CONTEMPORARY   MEN 
OF    LETTERS    SERIES 

EDITED    BY 
WILLIAM    ASPENWALL    BRADLEY 


BRET   HARTE 


FROM  A  PAINTING  BY  JOHN  PETTIE,   R.A. 

REPRODUCED  BY  PERMISSION  OF  THE  FINE  ARTS  SOCIETY,  LONDON. 
PHOTOGRAPH  BY  FRADELLE  &  YOUNG,  LONDON. 


BRET     HARTE 

BY    HENRY    W.     BOYNTON 


Contemporary 


NEW    YORK 
McCLURE,    PHILLIPS 
MCMIII 


CO. 


COFYBIGHT,   1903,    BY 

McCLURB,  PHILLIPS  A  CO. 


Published,  October,  1903 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I.    LIFE 3 

II.    PERSONALITY 48 

III.    WORK  .  80 


26S991 


BRET   HAUTE 


I 

LIFE 

Though  Bret  Harte  was  not  an  old  man 
when  he  died,  the  best  of  his  life  and  work 
was  lived  and  done  a  generation  ago.  He 
had  one  brilliant  vision  and  spent  the  rest 
of  his  life  in  reminding  himself  of  it.  In 
consequence,  it  ought  to  be  easier  than  it 
often  can  be  with  one  who  has  died  so 
recently  to  arrive  at  something  like  a  fair 
estimate  of  his  total  effectiveness.  Not 
much  has  been  done  toward  this  so  far. 
Bret  Harte's  death  called  forth  all  sorts 
of  newspaper  judgments,  and  a  so-called 
biography,  which  proved  to  be  at  once 
perfunctory  and  fulsome.  The  purpose 
of  the  present  sketch  is  to  consider  sober- 
ly what  sort  of  man  Bret  Harte  really 

[3] 


BRET   HARTE 

was,  and  what,  being  that  sort  of  man, 
he  really  did. 

Francis  Brett  Harte  was  born  in  Al- 
bany, N.  Y.,  August  25,  1839.  He  is 
said  to  have  had  English,  German,  and 
Hebrew  blood  in  his  veins.  His  father 
was  "professor"  of  Greek  in  the  Albany 
Female  College,  which  was  apparently  a 
girls'  seminary  of  the  old  type.  The  boy 
in  early  years  was  not  robust,  and  his 
father  was  sensible  enough  to  keep  him 
away  from  school  routine  for  a  time.  He 
had  learned  to  read,  however,  and  was  not 
kept  away  from  books;  and  he  was  not 
slower  than  other  boys  in  getting  up  an 
appetite  for  stories.  Beginning  at  seven 
with  "Dombey  and  Son,"  he  made  his 
way  presently,  via  Dickens,  pretty  well 
[4] 


LIFE 

through  the  itinerary  of  the  English 
novel.  Luckily  at  that  time  the  "juve- 
nile" had  not  yet  been  invented  by  the 
senile,  nor  had  Smollett  and  Fielding 
been  put  out  of  reach  on  the  upper  shelves 
of  the  family  library.  Bret  Harte  began 
to  write  fiction  with  the  best  English 
models  before  him;  though,  as  we  shall 
see,  his  work  as  a  whole  was  based  not 
upon  the  best  of  the  fiction  with  which 
he  was  familiar,  but  rather,  as  was  natu- 
ral for  a  talent  not  quite  of  the  first  kind, 
upon  the  fiction  which  was  most  popular 
in  his  day. 

There  was  nothing  unusual  in  this  boy- 
ish fondness  for  stories,  or  in  any  other 
quality  which  the  boy  showed;  not  even, 
alas,   in  his   production,   at  the   age   of 
[51 


BRET   HARTE 

eleven,  of  some  verses  which  were  good 
enough  to  be  printed  in  a  New  York 
journal.  The  parents,  it  appears,  disap- 
proved of  this  effusion,  not  so  much  be- 
cause it  was  bad  verse  as  because  they 
considered  poets  rather  disreputable  per- 
sons and  feared  that  the  son  might  turn 
out  to  be  one. 

He  had  in  due  time  four  or  five  years 
of  common-school  instruction;  it  was  all 
over  before  his  fifteenth  year,  and  he 
never  had  any  more  instruction  of  any 
kind.  He  does  not  appear,  at  any  time, 
to  have  expressed  regret  for  his  lack  of 
academic  training.  We  may  as  well  take 
it  for  granted  that  there  was  nothing  for 
him  to  regret.  What  a  man  might  have 
done  under  different  circumstances  is  as 
[6] 


LIFE 

much  a  matter  of  surmise  as  what  he 
might  have  done  with  a  different  charac- 
ter and  endowment.  Bret  Harte's  nature 
was  assimilative  rather  than  acquisitive; 
his  mind  followed  the  line  of  least  resist- 
ance, and  if  one  is  to  guess  at  all,  one  may 
as  well  guess  that  university  training 
could  have  done  little  for  him.  In  this, 
as  in  several  other  respects,  he  resembled 
Irving  and  Dickens,  the  two  writers 
whose  influence  upon  him  is  most  appar- 
ent, especially  in  his  early  work.  Like 
them,  he  seems  to  have  had  the  faculty 
in  youth  of  foregathering  with  the  books 
and  the  people  that  could  be  of  greatest 
use  to  him.  And  it  was  during  precisely 
the  years  which  he  would  naturally  have 
spent  in  the  seclusion  of  college  life  that 


BRET   HARTE 

he  was  able  to  assimilate  most  from  the 
open  world. 

At  all  events,  the  father's  death  left 
this  boy  of  fifteen  no  choice  but  to  find 
something  to  do  for  a  living.  In  1854 
he  and  his  mother  undertook  the  journey 
to  California  by  way  of  the  Isthmus  of 
Panama.  Here  one  is  faced  by  one  of 
the  little  mysteries  in  Bret  Harte's  life 
which  ordinary  inquiry  fails  to  solve.  It 
would  have  been  quite  natural  that,  left 
an  orphan  at  fifteen,  he  should,  like  any 
other  unattached  penniless  American  boy 
of  the  period,  have  turned  West  in  the 
trail  of  the  forty-niners.  All  manner  of 
golden  fables  were  making  their  way 
eastward,  and  irresistibly  luring  the  un- 
employed to  try  their  hand  at  the  new 
[8] 


LIFE 

game.  But  this  boy  was  not  an  orphan, 
his  mother  had  to  go  with  him,  and  the 
hardships  of  the  journey  West  made  it 
not  a  light  undertaking  for  a  woman. 
One  speculates  a  little  as  to  which  took 
the  other.  Was  the  boy  over-eager  for 
her  endurance?  or  did  they,  as  one  rumor 
goes,  follow  an  older  son  who  had  gone 
to  the  mines?  She  does  not  cumber  our 
narrative  long;  we  hear  of  her  as  hav- 
ing lived  at  Oakland  with  her  son  for 
a  time,  and  after  that  we  hear  nothing. 

San  Francisco,  where  the  boy  first 
looked  unsuccessfully  for  work,  was  not 
by  this  time  the  most  romantic  spot  in 
California,  in  its  open  and  confessed  char- 
acter. So  far  as  its  legislative  enact- 
ments and  journalistic  pronunciamentos 
[9] 


BRET   HARTE 

indicated,  it  might  have  been  a  model 
town  according  to  the  Anglo-Saxon  con- 
vention; a  town  eager  to  forget  its  fron- 
tier habits,  absorbed  in  the  consideration 
of  its  own  dignity,  and  gravely  bent  upon 
the  attainment  of  rank  as  a  centre  of 
civilisation.  Beneath  the  surface,  and  not 
far  beneath,  it  was  as  picturesque  and 
lawless  as  any  lover  of  raw  humanity 
could  have  desired  it  to  be.  Young 
Frank  Harte  did  not  find  a  fortune  ready 
to  his  hand  there  (did  not,  in  fact,  find 
any  sort  of  profitable  "job"),  but  he  did 
see  the  city  pretty  thoroughly;  and  in  a 
surprisingly  short  time  had  begun  to 
form  the  impression  of  California  life 
which  was,  after  a  time,  to  make  his  lit- 
erary fortune. 

[10] 


LIFE 

The  conditions  of  life  in  San  Francisco 
must  have  seemed  strangely  varied  to  a 
boy  who  had  been  brought  up  in  the  staid 
old  Dutch  town  of  Albany.  There  was 
the  pioneer  from  the  East  settling  into 
Western  citizenship ;  the  old  Spanish  resi- 
dent and,  a  more  important  fact,  his 
daughter;  the  "  Heathen  Chinee" ;  the 
professional  gambler;  the  miner  come  to 
town  to  get  rid  of  his  gold-dust:  nearly 
all  the  types,  in  short,  which  later  became 
the  writer's  stock-in-trade. 

But  Bret  Harte  had  for  some  time  yet 
no  suspicion  of  the  use  which  he  was  to 
make  of  his  experiences.  He  was  not  go- 
ing about  with  a  note-book  looking  for 
"copy."  He  was  looking  for  a  living, 
and  in  the  meantime  enjoying  every  ex- 
[11] 


BRET   HARTE 

perience  for  its  own  sake.  California  in 
the  fifties  was  a  place  in  which  experience 
might  be  had  very  readily,  if  not  very 
cheaply.  Not  finding  any  means  of  sup- 
porting himself  and  his  mother  in  San 
Francisco,  he  presently  set  out  on  foot 
for  Sonora,  Calaveras  County,  where  he 
set  up  a  school.  The  experiment,  like 
other  early  experiments,  was  not  espe- 
cially successful,  except  as  it  gave  him  the 
opportunity  for  new  impressions.  What 
some  of  these  impressions  were  he  has 
himself  recorded: 

"Here  I  was  thrown  among  the 
strangest  social  conditions  that  the  latter- 
day  world  has  perhaps  seen.  The  setting 
was  itself  heroic.  The  great  mountains 
of  the  Sierra  Nevada  lifted  majestic, 
[12] 


LIFE 

snow-capped  peaks  against  a  sky  of  purest 
blue.  Magnificent  pine  forests  of  trees 
which  were  themselves  enormous  gave  to 
the  landscape  a  sense  of  largeness  and 
greatness.  It  was  a  land  of  rugged 
canons,  sharp  declivities,  and  magnificent 
distances.  Amid  rushing  waters  and 
wildwood  freedom,  an  army  of  strong 
men,  in  red  shirts  and  top-boots,  were 
feverishly  in  search  of  the  buried  gold  of 
earth.  Nobody  shaved,  and  hair,  mous- 
taches, and  beards  were  untouched  by 
shears  or  razor.  Weaklings  and  old  men 
were  unknown.  It  took  a  stout  heart  and 
a  strong  frame  to  dare  the  venture,  to 
brave  the  journey  of  3,000  miles  and 
battle  for  life  in  the  wilds.  It  was  a  civ- 
ilisation composed  entirely  of  young  men, 


BRET   HARTE 

for  on  one  occasion,  I  remember,  an 
elderly  man — he  was  fifty,  perhaps,  but 
he  had  a  gray  beard — was  pointed  out  as 
a  curiosity  in  the  city,  and  men  turned  in 
the  street  to  look  at  him  as  they  would 
have  looked  at  any  other  unfamiliar  ob- 
ject. 

"These  men,  generally  speaking,  were 
highly  civilised,  many  of  them  being  cul- 
tured and  professionally  trained.  They 
were  in  strange  and  strong  contrast  with 
their  surroundings,  for  all  the  trammels 
and  conventionalities  of  settled  civilisa- 
tion had  been  left  thousands  of  miles  be- 
hind. It  was  a  land  of  perfect  freedom, 
limited  only  by  the  instinct  and  the  habit 
of  law  which  prevailed  in  the  mass.  All 
its  forms  were  original,  rude,  and  pictu- 
[14] 


LIFE 

resque.  Woman  was  almost  unknown, 
and  enjoyed  the  high  estimation  of  a 
rarity.  The  chivalry  natural  to  manhood 
invested  her  with  ideal  value  when  respect 
could  supplement  it,  and  with  exceptional 
value  even  when  it  could  not.  Strong 
passions  brought  quick  climaxes,  all  the 
better  and  worse  forces  of  manhood  being 
in  unbridled  play.  To  me  it  was  like  a 
strange,  ever-varying  panorama,  so  novel 
that  it  was  difficult  to  grasp  comprehen- 
sively. In  fact,  it  was  not  till  years  after- 
ward that  the  great  mass  of  primary  im- 
pressions on  my  mind  became  sufficiently 
clarified  for  literary  use." 

The    lad    had    one    qualification    for 
school-teaching,    though   he    can    hardly 
have  had  any  other — an  understanding  of 
[15] 


BRET  HARTE 

children.  Oddly  enough,  his  literary 
treatment  of  childish  character  is  less  sen- 
timental than  his  handling  of  adult  char- 
acter. .  Probably  the  routine  of  school- 
life  was  bitter  enough  to  the  taste  of  one 
who  was  himself  little  better  than  "a 
truant  schoolboy,"  to  use  his  own  phrase. 
The  hard  manual  labor  and  the  modest 
returns  of  placer  mining,  as  he  tried  it  a 
little  later,  were  not  more  to  his  taste; 
and  before,  at  the  age  of  nineteen,  he  re- 
turned to  San  Francisco  he  had  hard 
experience  as  a  tax-collector,  a  Wells- 
Fargo  Express  messenger,  a  druggist's 
assistant,  and  a  compositor.  Many  of  his 
subsequent  tales  turned  upon  these  early 
experiences,  though  more  of  them  have 
to  do  with  what  he  saw  and  heard  than 
[16] 


LIFE 

with  what  he  did.  And  what  he  did  was 
of  even  less  profit  to  his  pocket.  When 
presently  he  returned  to  San  Francisco, 
he  was  still  in  search  of  employment,  and 
only  his  experience  as  compositor  proved 
of  value  to  him;  it  got  him  the  chance  to 
set  type  in  the  composing-room  of  The 
Golden  Era. 

"The  Golden  Era"  says  Mr.  Charles 
Warren  Stoddard,  "was  the  cradle  and 
grave  of  many  a  high  hope — there  was 
nothing  to  be  compared  with  it  that  side 
of  the  Mississippi;  and  though  it  could 
point  with  pride — it  never  failed  to  do  so 
— to  a  somewhat  notable  line  of  contribu- 
tors, it  had  always  the  fine  air  of  the 
amateur.  ...  I  remember  his  [the 
editor's]  calling  my  attention  to  a  certain 

[17] 


BRET   HARTE 

anonymous  contribution,  just  received, 
and  nodding  his  head  prophetically,  for 
he  already  had  his  eye  on  its  fledgling 
author,  a  young  compositor  on  the  floor 
above.  It  was  Bret  Harte's  first  appear- 
ance in  The  Golden  Era." 

Of  the  quality  of  the  audience  to  which 
The  Golden  Era  addressed  itself,  Bret 
Harte  gave,  late  in  life,  a  surprisingly 
flattering  account.  His  earlier  efforts, 
he  says,  "were  addressed  to  an  audience 
half  foreign  in  their  sympathies,  and  still 
imbued  with  Eastern  or  New  England 
habits  and  literary  traditions.  'Home' 
was  still  potent  with  these  voluntary  ex- 
iles in  their  moments  of  relaxation.  East- 
ern magazines  and  current  Eastern  lit- 
erature formed  their  literary  recreation, 
[18] 


LIFE 

and  the  sale  of  the  better  class  of  periodi- 
cals was  singularly  great.  Nor  was  this 
taste  confined  to  American  literature. 
The  illustrated  and  satirical  English 
journals  were  as  frequently  seen  in  Cali- 
fornia as  in  Massachusetts; -and  the  au- 
thor records  that  he  has  experienced  more 
difficulty  in  procuring  a  copy  of  Punch 
in  an  English  provincial  town  than  was 
his  fortune  at  'Red  Dog'  or  'One-Horse 
Gulch.'  An  audience  thus  liberally 
equipped  and  familiar  with  the  best  mod- 
ern writers  was  naturally  critical  and  ex- 
acting, and  no  one  appreciates  more  than 
he  does  the  salutary  effects  of  this  severe 
discipline  upon  his  earlier  efforts." 

It  may  be  wrong  to  imagine  that  mem- 
ory tinged  the  facts  with  a  rosy  bloom. 
[19] 


BRET   HARTE 

The  means  by  which  this  critical  and  ex- 
acting temper  expressed  itself  were,  at 
least,  not  always  Eastern  or  academic. 
The  first  book  with  which  Bret  Harte  had 
to  do  was  an  anthology  of  Californian 
verse.  Here  is  one  of  the  salutary  and 
severe  notices  which,  according  to  the 
author's  own  account,  it  received  —  a 
"tempered"  version,  moreover: 

"The  hogwash  and  purp-stuff  ladled 

out  from  the  slop-bucket  of  Messrs. 

and  Co.,  of  Frisco,  by  some  lop-eared 
Eastern  apprentice,  and  called  'A  Com- 
pilation of  Californian  Verse,'  might  be 
passed  over,  so  far  as  criticism  goes.  A 
club  in  the  hands  of  any  able-bodied  citi- 
zen of  Red  Dog  and  a  steamboat  ticket 
to  the  Bay,  cheerfully  contributed  from 
[20] 


LIFE 

this  office,  would  be  all-sufficient.  But 
when  an  imported  greenhorn  dares  to  call 
his  flapdoodle  mixture  '  Calif  ornian,'  it  is 
an  insult  to  the  State  that  has  produced 
the  gifted  'Yellow  Hammer,'  whose  lofty 
flights  have,  from  time  to  time,  dazzled 
our  readers  in  the  columns  of  The  Jay 
Hawk.  That  this  complacent  editorial 
jackass,  browsing  among  the  docks  and 
thistles  which  he  has  served  up  in  this  vol- 
ume, should  make  no  allusion  to  Califor- 
nia's greatest  bard  is  rather  a  confession 
of  his  idiocy  than  a  slur  upon  the  genius 
.of  our  esteemed  contributor." 

Whatever  may-be  true  of  the  general 
literacy  and  refinement  of  that  early  Cali- 
fornia, there  is  no  doubt  that  San  Fran- 
cisco contained  men  of  literary  ability. 
[21] 


BRET   HARTE 

At  the  moment  of  Harte's  connection 
with  The  Golden  Era  the  city  possessed 
a  group  of  vigorous  young  journalists, 
most  of  whom  had  literary  ambition. 
Among  them  were  Mark  Twain,  Charles 
Warren  Stoddard,  Prentice  Mulford, 
and  Charles  Henry  Webb.  Largely  to 
provide  a  vehicle  for  their  theories  and 
their  work,  The  Calif  or  nian  was  founded. 
The  journal  did  not  Jive  long,  in  spite 
of  the  unusual  quality  of  its  staff.  Its 
epitaph  has  been  neatly  phrased  by  Mr. 
Howells.  "These  ingenuous  young  men," 
he  says,  "with  the  fatuity  of  gifted  peo- 
ple, had  established  a  literary  newspaper 
in  San  Francisco,  and  they  brilliantly  co- 
operated to  its  early  extinction." 

Among  the  casual  presences  attracted 
[22] 


LIFE 

by  that  old  California  was  a  certain  Sam 
Clemens,  who  had  begun  to  write  over 
the  signature  of  Mark  Twain,  but  had  re- 
ceived no  general  recognition.  Curiously 
enough,  it  was  through  Bret  Harte  and 
The  Calif ornian  that  his  first  hit  was 
made.l  A  month  after  their  first  meeting] 
Mr.  Clemens  called  on  Harte,  who  tells^ 
this  story:  "He  had  been  away  in  the  min- 
ing districts  on  some  newspaper  assign- 
ment in  the  meantime.  In  the  course  of 
conversation  he  remarked  that  the  un- 
earthly laziness  that  prevailed  in  the  town 
he  had  been  visiting  was  beyond  any- 
thing in  his  previous  experience.  He  said 
the  men  did  nothing  all  day  long  but  sit 
around  the  bar-room  stove,  spit,  and 
'swop  lies.'  He  spoke  in  a  slow,  rather 

[23] 


BRET   HARTE 

satirical  drawl,  which  was  in  itself  irre- 
sistible. He  went  on  to  tell  one  of  those 
extravagant  stories,  and  half  uncon- 
sciously dropped  into  the  lazy  tone  and 
manner  of  the  original  narrator.  I  asked 
him  to  tell  it  again  to  a  friend  who  came 
in,  and  then  asked  him  to  write  it  out  for 
The  Calif ornian.  He  did  so,  and  when 
published  it  was  an  emphatic  success.  It 
was  the  first  work  of  his  that  had  at- 
tracted general  attention,  and  it  crossed 
the  Sierras  for  an  Eastern  reading.  The 
story  was  'The  Jumping  Frog  of  Cala- 
veras.'  It  is  now  known  and  laughed 
over,  I  suppose,  wherever  the  English 
tongue  is  spoken;  but  it  will  never  be  as 
funny  to  anyone  in  print  as  it  was  to  me, 
told  for  the  first  time  by  the  unknown 
[24] 


LIFE 

Twain  himself  on  that  morning  in  the 
San  Francisco  Mint." 

Bret  Harte  was  at  this  time  secretary 
to  the  superintendent  of  the  United 
States  Mint,  and  also  had  a  place  upon 
the  staff  of  The  Golden  Era,  to  which, 
upon  the  collapse  of  The  Calif  ornian, 
Mark  Twain  became  a  frequent  contribu- 
tor. Most  of  Harte's  own  work  during 
this  period  was  purely  journalistic  in 

•  ^p. 

effect,  though  he  had  already  produced 
prose  and  verse  of  a  literary  quality. 

His  most  decisive  step  from  journalism 
to  literature  was  made  when,  in  1868,  he 
became  the  editor  of  the  newly  founded 
Overland  Monthly.  In  the  second  num- 
ber appeared  "The  Luck  of  Roaring 
Camp,"  the  first  and  the  most  famous  of 
[25] 


BRET   HARTE 

his  short  stories.  It  is  worth  while  to 
quote  somewhat  fully  from  the  author's 
own  account  of  the  circumstances  under 
which  the  story  was  printed,  and  of  the 
reception  which  it  met: 

"When  the  first  number  of  the  Over- 
land Monthly  appeared  the  author,  then 
its  editor,  called  the  publisher's  attention 
to  the  lack  of  any  distinctively  Califor- 
nian  romance  in  its  pages,  and  averred 
that,  should  no  other  contribution  come 
in,  he  himself  would  supply  the  omission 
in  the  next  number.  No  other  contribu- 
tion was  offered,  and  the  author,  having 
the  plot  and  the  general  idea  in  his  mind, 
in  a  few  days  sent  the  manuscript  of  'The 
Luck  of  Roaring  Camp'  to  the  printer. 
He  had  not  yet  received  the  proof-sheets 
[26] 


LIFE 

when  he  was  suddenly  summoned  to  the 
office  of  the  publisher,  whom  he  found 
standing,  the  picture  of  dismay  and  anxi- 
ety, with  the  proof  before  him.  The  in- 
dignation and  stupefaction  of  the  author 
can  be  well  understood  when  he  was  told 
that  the  printer,  instead  of  returning  the 
proofs  to  him,  had  submitted  them  to  the 
publisher,  with  the  emphatic  declaration 
that  the  matter  there  was  so  indecent, 
irreligious,  and  improper  that  his  proof- 
reader— a  young  lady — had  with  diffi- 
culty been  induced  to  continue  its  perusal, 
and  that  he,  as  a  friend  of  the  publisher, 
and  a  well-wisher  of  the  magazine,  was 
impelled  to  present  to  him  personally  this 
shameless  evidence  of  the  manner  in  which 
the  editor  was  imperilling  the  future  use- 
[27] 


BRET   HARTE 

fulness  of  that  enterprise."  The  pub- 
lisher and  others  who  read  the  story  were 
inclined  to  agree  that  it  ought  not  to 
appear  in  the  Overland  Monthly.  "Fi- 
nally the  story  was  submitted  to  three 
gentlemen  of  culture  and  experience, 
friends  of  publisher  and  author,  who  were 
unable,  however,  to  come  to  any  clear 
decision.  It  was,  however,  suggested  to 
the  author  that,  assuming  the  natural 
hypothesis  that  his  editorial  reasoning 
might  be  warped  by  his  literary  predilec- 
tions in  a  consideration  of  one  of  his  own 
productions,  a  personal  sacrifice  would  at 
this  juncture  be  in  the  last  degree  heroic. 
This  last  suggestion  had  the  effect  of 
ending  all  further  discussion,  for  he  at 
once  informed  the  publisher  that  the 
[28] 


LIFE 

question  of  the  propriety  of  the  story 
was  no  longer  at  issue;  the  only  question 
was  of  his  capacity  to  exercise  the  proper 
editorial  judgment,  and  that  unless  he 
was  permitted  to  test  that  capacity  by 
the  publication  of  the  story,  and  abide 
squarely  by  the  result,  he  must  resign  his 
editorial  position." 

Of  course  the  story  was  printed,  and, 
except  among  the  unco  guid  and  a  class 
of  Calif ornians  who  thought  the  dignity 
of  California  ought  to  be  upheld  if  neces- 
sary at  the  expense  of  truth,  scored  a 
great  success.  In  the  Eastern  States  and 
in  England  the  response  was  immediate 
and  enthusiastic.  One  of  the  most  flat- 
tering signs  of  its  success  was  a  letter 
from  Fields,  Osgood  &  Co.,  publishers  of 

[29] 


BRET   HARTE 

The  Atlantic  Monthly,  asking  for  a  story 
in  the  vein  of  "The  Luck  of  Roaring 
Camp." 

At  first  this  general  approbation  had 
a  good  effect.  "Thus  encouraged,"  he 
wrote  many  years  later,  "  'The  Luck  of 
Roaring  Camp'  was  followed  by  'The 
Outcasts  of  Poker  Flat,'  'Higgles,'  'Ten- 
nessee's Partner,'  and  those  various  other 
characters  who  had  impressed  the  author 
when,  a  mere  truant  schoolboy,  he  had 
lived  among  them.  It  is  hardly  necessary 
to  say  to  any  observer  of  human  nature 
that  at  this  time  he  was  advised  by  kind 
and  well-meaning  friends  to  content  him- 
self with  the  success  of  the  'Luck,'  and 
not  tempt  criticism  again;  or  from  that 
moment  ever  after  he  was  in  receipt  of 
[30] 


LIFE 

that  equally  sincere  contemporaneous 
criticism  which  assured  him  gravely  that 
each  successive  story  was  a  falling  off 
from  the  last.  Howbeit,  by  reinvigorated 
confidence  in  himself  and  some  conscien- 
tious industry,  he  managed  to  get  to- 
gether in  a  year  six  or  eight  of  these 
sketches,  which,  in  a  volume  called  'The 
Luck  of  Roaring  Camp  and  other 
Sketches,'  gave  him  that  encouragement 
in  America  and  England  that  has  since 
seemed  to  justify  him  in  swelling  these 
records  of  a  picturesque  passing  civilisa- 
tion into  the  compass  of  the  present 
edition. 

"A  few  words  regarding  the  peculiar 
conditions  of  life  and  society  that  are 
here  rudely  sketched,  and  often  but  bare- 
[31] 


BRET   HARTE 

ly  outlined.  The  author  is  aware  that, 
partly  from  a  habit  of  thought  and  ex- 
pression, partly  from  the  exigencies  of 
brevity  in  his  narratives,  and  partly  from 
the  habit  of  addressing  an  audience  fa- 
miliar with  the  local  scenery,  he  often 
assumes,  as  premises  already  granted  by 
the  reader,  the  existence  of  a  peculiar  and 
romantic  state  of  civilisation,  the  like  of 
which  few  English  readers  are  inclined 
to  accept  without  corroborative  facts  and 
figures.  These  he  could  only  give  by  re- 
ferring to  the  ephemeral  records  of  Cali- 
fornian  journals  of  that  date  and  the  testi- 
mony of  far-scattered  witnesses,  survivors 
of  the  exodus  of  1849.  He  must  beg  the 
reader  to  bear  in  mind  that  this  emigra- 
tion was  either  across  a  continent  almost 
[32] 


LIFE 

unexplored  or  by  the  way  of  a  long  and 
dangerous  voyage  around  Cape  Horn, 
and  that  the  promised  land  itself  pre- 
sented the  singular  spectacle  of  a  patri- 
archal Latin  race  who  had  been  left  to 
themselves,  forgotten  by  the  world,  for 
nearly  three  hundred  years.  The  faith, 
courage,  vigour,  youth,  and  capacity  for 
adventure  necessary  to  this  emigration 
produced  a  body  of  men  as  strongly  dis- 
tinctive as  the  companions  of  Jason.  Un- 
like most  pioneers,  the  majority  were  men 
of  profession  and  education;  all  were 
young,  and  all  had  staked  their  future  in 
the  enterprise.  Critics  who  have  taken 
large  and  exhaustive  views  of  mankind 
and  society  from  club  windows  in  Pall 
Mall  or  the  Fifth  Avenue  can  only  accept 

[33] 


BRET   HARTE 

for  granted  the  turbulent  chivalry  that 
thronged  the  streets  of  San  Francisco  in 
the  gala  day  of  her  youth,  and  must  read 
the  blazon  of  their  deeds  like  the  doubtful 
quarterings  of  the  shield  of  Amadis  de 
Gaul.  The  author  has  been  frequently 
asked  if  such  and  such  incidents  were  real 
— if  he  had  ever  met  such  and  such  char- 
acters. To  this  he  must  return  the  same 
answer,  that  in  only  a  single  instance  was 
he  conscious  of  drawing  purely  from  his 
imagination  and  fancy  for  a  character 
and  a  logical  succession  of  incidents 
drawn  therefrom.  A  few  weeks  after  his 
story  was  published  he  received  a  letter, 
authentically  signed,  correcting  some  of 
the  minor  details  of  his  facts  (?)  and  en- 
closing as  corroborative  evidence  a  slip 
[34] 


LIFE 

from  an  old  newspaper,  wherein  the  main 
incident  of  his  supposed  fanciful  creation 
was  recorded  with  a  largeness  of  state- 
ment that  far  transcended  his  powers  of 
imagination." 

His  first  great  success  was  quickly  fol- 
lowed by  his  second;  it  could  not  have 
occurred  to  anybody  then  that  there  could 
never  be  any  further  successes  of  the  same 
rank.  "Plain  Language  from  Truthful 
James,"  or,  as  it  came  to  be  called,  "The 
Heathen  Chinee,"  at  once  gained  a  no- 
toriety even  wider  than  his  short  stories 
had  won.  Like  "The  Luck  of  Roaring 
Camp,"  it  aroused  only  mild  interest  in 
San  Francisco,  but  in  the  East  and  in 
England  it  was  hailed  with  delight. 
After  the  passage  of  a  generation  it  re- 

[35] 


BRET   HARTE 

mains  one  of  the  best  known  humorous 
poems  in  the  language;  its  phraseology 
has  even  attained  the  secondary  fame  of 
being  familiar  to  thousands  who  do  not 
know  the  whole  poem.  The  author  him- 
self grew  a  little  tired  of  the  excessive 
popularity  of  a  mere  jeu  df  esprit. 

Some  light  is  thrown  upon  his  charac- 
ter, as  well  as  upon  the  history  of  these 
famous  verses,  in  the  following  item  from 
the  San  Francisco  News-Letter,  written 
shortly  after  Harte's  death: 

"Slow  of  speech  and  thought,  he  never 
could  be  depended  upon  to  supply  copy 
on  time  to  his  printer.  For  a  period  he 
was  supposed  to  be  a  regular  contributor 
to  the  columns  of  this  paper,  but  he  was 
never  a  'regular'  contributor  to  any  pa- 
[36] 


LIFE 

per.  On  one  occasion,  after  a  silence  of 
two  or  three  weeks,  he  suddenly  recalled 
his  duty  to  the  News-Lett er,  and  going 
through  some  manuscript,  selected  a  short 
poem  and  handed  it  in  to  this  office.  The 
late  Mr.  Marriott,  who  was  conceded  to 
be  an  excellent  judge  of  poetry,  rejected 
it,  asserting  that  it  was  'twaddle.'  About 
a  year  afterward  Mr.  Harte,  being  hard 
up  for  copy,  as  he  usually  was,  published 
his  rejected  poem  in  the  Overland 
Monthly,  of  which  he  had  become  editor. 
It  made  the  writer  famous  in  a  day,  for 
it  was  none  other  than  'The  Heathen 
Chinee,'  which  was  soon  in  everybody's 
mouth.  This  writer  afterward  asked  Mr. 
Marriott  how  he  came  to  reject  so  popu- 
lar a  success.  He  replied  that  'it  was  evi- 

[37] 


BRET   HARTE 

d^nt  that  the  best  might  sometimes  be 
:en.'    The  fact  was  that  by  his  dila- 
tor|ness  Mr.  Harte  had  become  persona 
grata,  and  the  venerable  editor  took 
this \  way  of  getting  even  with  him." 

re  shall  have  something  to  say  pres- 
ently of  the  merit  of  "The  Heathen 
Chinee."  Here  we  have  to  consider  only 
its  sudden  popularity  and  the  effect  of 
that  popularity  upon  its  author's  career. 
There  is  little  doubt  that  it  served  to 
clinch  the  general  conviction  that  Bret 
Harte  was  too  important  a  person  to  live 
in  California. 

In  the  spring  of  1870,  at  all  events,  the 

now  famous  writer  left  California  not  to 

return.     He  had  lived  there  for  sixteen 

years.     Between  the  ages  of  fifteen  and 

[38] 


LIFE 

nineteen,  in  the  course  of  his  miscellane- 
ous experience  of  California  life,  he  had 
gathered  pretty  much  all  the  material 
for  his  work.  During  the  next  five  or 
six  years  he  was  profitably  employed  in 
growing  old  enough  to  begin  to  make 
effective  use  of  this  material.  Most  of 
his  best  work  was  done  within  two  years 
of  his  assumption  of  the  Overland 
Monthly  editorship.  His  motives  in  leav- 
ing California  at  the  end  of  these  two 
years  have  been  a  good  deal  discussed. 
The  plain  truth  seems  to  be  that  his  head 
was  turned,  and  he  naturally  edged  tow- 
ard the  point  of  the  compass  from  which 
the  applause  came  loudest.  It  is  impos- 
sible not  to  see  weakness  in  the  facility 
with  which  he  succumbed  to  the  pressure 

[39] 


BRET   HARTE 

which  was  brought  to  bear  upon  him  by 
Eastern  publishers  and  Eastern  admirers. 
It  is  possible,  however,  that  too  much 
has  been  made  of  the  effect  upon  his  work 
of  his  physical  removal  to  the  East,  and, 
subsequently,  to  England.  His  interpre- 
tation of  early  California  life  appears  to 
have  been  complete;  very  likely  if  he  had 
remained  he  would  have  been  unable  to 
make  effective  literary  use  of  the  more 
complicated  conditions  which  were  al- 
ready developing.  Just  that  one  pictu- 
resque episode  in  American  life  he  seems 
to  have  been  born  to  understand  and  to 
chronicle,  and  he  can  hardly  be  held  re- 
sponsible for  having  outlived  the  moment 
without  being  able  to  forget  it.  Cer- 
tainly there  never  came  another  moment 
[40] 


LIFE 

which  he  knew  how  to  interpret  in  the 
same  way;  and  he  had,  if  he  was  to  write 
at  all,  to  remain  for  the  rest  of  his  life 
his  own  copyist,  when  he  did  not  choose 
to  be  the  copyist  of  others. 

Before  we  follow  him  across  the  con- 
tinent to  New  York  it  may  be  worth 
while  to  note  what  sort  of  place  he  had 
made  for  himself  in  California.  He  had 
gained  and  held  for  years  a  fairly  profit- 
able sinecure  in  the  San  Francisco  Mint; 
he  had  gained  and  held  with  credit  the 
editorship  of  the  Overland  Monthly; 
and  he  had  been  invited,  not  long  be- 
fore his  departure  for  the  East,  to  a  chair 
of  literature  at  the  University  of  Cali- 
fornia. Such  marks  of  public  approba- 
[41] 


BRET   HARTE 

tion  he  had  received,  and  he  had  made 
warm  personal  friends.  He  had  also 
gained  a  reputation  for  that  unreliability, 
so  far  as  meeting  engagements  and  pay- 
ing debts  are  concerned,  which  is  sup- 
posed (except  by  employers  and  cred- 
itors) to  be  an  engaging  if  not  virtuous 
corollary  of  "the  artistic  temperament." 

With  such  a  nature  and  with  such  s, 
fame  the  young  author  was  not  likely  to 
bear  himself  very  wisely  during  the  dan- 
gerous process,  upon  which  the  public  is 
inclined  in  such  cases  to  insist,  of  transla- 
tion from  a  personality  into  a  personage. 
According  to  the  usual  fatuous  method 
of  publics,  his  Eastern  admirers  lost  no 
time  in  feting  and  flattering  their  idol  of 
the  moment  beyond  the  point  of  reason. 
[42] 


LIFE 

He  was  introduced  to  authors'  clubs, 
forced  to  give  a  Phi  Beta  Kappa  poem 
at  Harvard  (which,  naturally,  turned  out 
to  be  rather  inadequate),  and  urged  to 
write  for  the  best  magazines.  The  At- 
lantic Monthly  subsidised  him,  for  a  time, 
at  a  salary  of  ten  thousand  dollars  a  year. 
The  result  was  what  might  have  been 
expected  by  those  who  really  knew  the 
man.  During,  we  will  say,  the  three 
years  which  assisted  in  the  production  of 
the  author's  strongest  and  most  sincere 
work  he  seems  to  have  been  inspired  by 
a  genuine  creative  impulse,  made  more 
fruitful  in  its  later  manifestations  by  the 
grateful  sense  that  the  world  was  ready 
to  appreciate  the  best  of  what  he  could 
give  it.  This  was  the  period  of  perfect 
[43] 


BRET   HARTE 

balance  between  the  working  of  the  cre- 
ative instinct  and  the  sense  of  its  accept- 
able worth  which,  to  any  but  the  highest 
order  of  creative  genius,  must  be  brief. 
Later,  and  with  a  somewhat  indecorous 
suddenness,  as  it  seems  to  the  student  of 
such  phenomena,  the  balance  was  de- 
stroyed. A  little  flattery,  a  little  money 
in  sight,  and  the  artist  (quite  innocently, 
like  a  child  whose  head  is  turned  by  too 
much  attention)  becomes  an  artisan. 

The  unreliability  which  we  have  noted 
as  characteristic  of  his  career  in  Califor- 
nia became  more  and  more  marked  dur- 
ing the  years  immediately  following  his 
translation  to  the  East.  In  San  Fran- 
cisco his  life  had  never  wholly  lacked  the 
safeguard  of  routine  which  is  so  essential 
[44] 


LIFE 

to  the  productiveness  of  temperaments 
like  his.  He  was  now  his  own  master, 
free  to  do  his  work  as  he  chose,  and  un- 
hampered by  the  pressure  of  small  duties. 
Consequently  he  did  very  little.  The 
salary  of  ten  thousand  dollars  paid  by 
The  Atlantic  Monthly,  for  an  indefinite 
number  of  contributions,  proved  a  very 
bad  speculation,  for  the  Atlantic. 

In  New  York  he  found  himself  con- 
tinually more  involved  in  social  engage- 
ments, and  his  summers  were  passed  at 
expensive  resorts,  such  as  Cohasset,  Len- 
ox, and  Newport.  {"He  was,  in  short, 
growing  idle  and  extravagant,  making 
something  of  a  figure  in  the  world  about 
town,  and  hardly  holding  his  own  in  the 
world  of  letters.  In  the  course  of  a  few 

[45] 


BRET   HARTE 

years  he  was  hopelessly  in  debt.  He 
made  a  good  deal  of  money,  by  lecturing 
as  well  as  by  writing,  but  it  was  his  in- 
stinct to  live  beyond  his  means.  He  had 
already  tasted  the  joys  of  the  political 
sinecure,  and  when  at  length  a  chance 
came  to  lie  by  for  a  time  in  that  kind  of 
safe  harbour  he  was  not  slow  in  accept- 
ing it.  In  1878  he  left  his  family  and 
his  more  pressing  embarrassments  in 
America  to  accept  a  small  Prussian  Con- 
sulate. "It  is  to  be  hoped,"  wrote  the 
London  Athenaeum,  with  unconscious 
irony,  "that  his  consular  duties  at  Cre- 
feld  will  not  prove  so  engrossing  as  to 
prevent  him  from  continuing  to  write." 
Bret  Harte  was  quite  incapable  of  being 
inconvenienced  by  consular  duties,  either 
[46] 


LIFE 

at  Crefeld,  or  at  Glasgow,  whither,  by  the 
labours  of  American  friends,  he  presently 
found  himself  transferred.  It  seems,  in- 
deed, to  be  clear  that  his  absorption  in 
the  duties  of  his  post  at  Glasgow  was 
so  notoriously  a  fault  of  omission  that  his 
removal  in  1885  was  a  matter  of  neces- 
sity. .-  The  rest  of  his  life  he  spent  in  Eng- 
land, and  during  those  seventeen  years, 
though  he  wrote  much,  he  produced  noth- 
ing which  added  materially  to  his  reputa- 
tion. He  died  at  the  country-house  of  a 
friend  in  Surrey,  May  5,  1902. 


[47] 


II 

PERSONALITY 

What,  then,  is  the  sum  of  our  impres- 
sion of  Bret  Harte's  personality?  It  is 
safe  to  say,  to  begin  with,  that  its  chief 
ingredient  was  temperament  rather  than 
character.  There  was  nothing  heroic 
about  the  man,  either  for  good  or  ill. 
Those  boyish  experiences  of  his  in  Cali- 
fornia do  indicate  that  he  was  not  defi- 
cient in  physical  courage.  He  showed 
constancy,  too,  in  his  early  attempts  at 
literature,  and,  in  the  moment  of  his  first 
realisation  of  power,  a  kind  of  exaltation 
which  for  a  time  kept  him  up  to  the  mark. 
Thereafter,  as  we  have  said,  he  followed 
the  line  of  least  resistance,  drifting  upon 
a  pleasant  tide  of  approbation,  filling,  in 
[48] 


PERSONALITY 

the  approved  way,  the  literary  orders 
which  unfailingly  came  to  him,  and,  in 
short,  making  the  easiest  possible  business 
of  his  art  and  of  his  life. 

Such  letters  of  his  as  have  been  pub- 
lished present  him,  on  the  whole,  in  a  more 
favourable  light  than  one  would  expect. 
They  are  not  only  neat  and  humorous, 
they  often  attract  one  strongly  to  the 
writer  for  his  own  sake.  They  remind 
one  that  it  is  not  enough  to  consider  a 
man's  relation  to  his  employers  or  his 
creditors,  or  even  to  his  work.  We  have 
also  to  ask  what  kind  of  man  he  was  in 
the  eyes  of  his  friends,  and  how  much  he 
counted  for  in  their  lives. 

His  domestic  experience  was  not  ideal. 
He  was  married  just  before  he  reached 
[49] 


BRET   HARTE 

the  not  over-marriageable  age  of  twenty- 
three,  and  when  he  left  California  there 
were  two  children,  who  were  followed 
later  by  two  more.  No  open  scandal  was 
ever  connected  with  his  name,  but  it  is 
not  a  secret  that  for  some  time  before  his 
departure  from  America  his  home  life 
was  not  of  the  pleasantest.  Letters  writ- 
ten during  a  lecturing  tour  in  the  West 
in  1873  show  that  the  break,  if  break 
there  was,  came  later.  One  notices  that 
he  talks,  as  a  man  may  to  his  wife,  a 
good  deal  of  his  inconveniences  and  his 
symptoms : 

"I  did  not  want  to  write  this  disap- 
pointment to  you  as  long  as  there  was 
some  prospect  of  better  things.    You  can 
imagine,  however,  how  I  feel  at  this  cruel 
[50] 


PERSONALITY 

loss  of  time  and  money — to  say  nothing 
of  my  health,  which  is  still  so  poor.  I  had 
almost  recovered  from  my  cold,  but  while 
lecturing  at  Ottawa  at  the  Skating  Rink, 
a  hideous,  dismal,  damp  barn — the  only 
available  place  in  town — I  caught  a  fresh 
cold,  and  have  been  coughing  badly  ever 
since.  And  you  can  well  imagine  that  my 
business  annoyances  do  not  add  greatly  to 
my  sleep  or  appetite. 

"I  make  no  comment;  you  can  imag- 
ine the  half -sick,  utterly  disgusted  man 
who  glared  at  that  audience  over  his  desk 
that  night,  and  d — d  them  inwardly  in  his 
heart." 

These    letters    also    contain    passages 
which  show  that  the  eye  which  had  been 
so  keen  in  California  days  had  not  grown 
[51] 


BRET   HARTE 

dull.    Of  the  society  of  a  Kansas  city  he 
says: 

"And,  of  course,  as  in  all  such  places, 
the  women  contrast  poorly  with  the  men 
— even  in  feminine  qualities.  Somehow  a 
man  here  may  wear  fustian  and  glaring 
colours  and  paper  collars  and  yet  keep  his 
gentleness  and  delicacy,  but  a  woman  in 
glaring  'Dolly  Vardens'  and  artificial 
flowers  changes  nature  with  him  at  once. 
I've  seen  but  one  that  interested  me — an 
old  negro  wench.  She  was  talking  and 
laughing  outside  my  door  the  other  even- 
ing, but  her  laugh  was  so  sweet  and  unc- 
tuous and  musical — so  full  of  breadth  and 
goodness,  that  I  went  outside  and  talked 
to  her  while  she  was  scrubbing  the  stones. 
She  laughed  as  a  canary-bird  sings — be- 
[52] 


PERSONALITY 

cause  she  couldn't  help  it.  It  did  me  a 
world  of  good,  for  it  was  before  the  lec- 
ture, at  twilight,  when  I  am  very  blue  and 
low-tuned.  She  had  been  a  slave." 

His  first  letters  from  Cref eld  are  more 
than  perfunctorily  affectionate.  He  finds 
himself  very  lonely  and  forlorn: 

"It's  been  up-hill  work  ever  since  I 
left  New  York,  but  I  shall  try  to  see  it 
through,  please  God!  I  don't  allow  my- 
self to  think  over  it  at  all,  or  I  should  go 
crazy.  I  shut  my  eyes  to  it,  and  in  doing 
so  perhaps  I  shut  out  what  is  often  so 
pleasant  to  a  traveller's  first  impressions, 
but  thus  far  London  has  only  seemed  to 
me  a  sluggish  nightmare  through  which 
I  have  waked,  and  Paris  a  confused  sort 
of  hysterical  experience.  I  had  hoped  for 
[53] 


HARTE 

a  little  kindness  and  rest  here.  Perhaps 
it  may  come.  To-day  I  found  here  (for- 
warded from  London)  a  kind  little  re- 
sponse to  my  card,  from  Froude,  who 
invites  me  to  come  to  his  country  place — 
an  old  seaport  village  in  Devonshire.  If 
everything  has  gone  well  here — if  I  can 
make  it  go  well  here — I  shall  go  back  to 
London  and  Paris  for  a  vacation  of  a  few 
weeks,  and  see  Froude  at  last. 

"At  least,  Nan,  be  sure  I've  written 
now  the  worst;  I  think  things  must  be 
better  soon.  I  shall,  please  God,  make 
some  friends  in  good  time,  and  will  try 
and  be  patient.  But  I  shall  not  think  of 
sending  for  you  until  I  see  clearly  that  I 
can  stay  myself.  If  the  worst  comes  to 
the  worst  I  shall  try  to  stand  it  for  a  year, 
[54] 


PERSONALITY 

and  save  enough  to  come  home  and  begin 
anew  there.  But  I  could  not  stand  it  to 
see  you  break  your  heart  here  through 
disappointment,  as  I  mayhap  may  do." 

It  would  be  unfair  to  suggest  that  there 
is  deliberate  disingenuousness  in  the  clos- 
ing sentences,  yet,  allowing  for  the  im- 
personal loneliness  and  nostalgia  which  so 
naturally  belongs  to  a  first  experience  in 
a  strange  land,  it  is  hard  to  take  them 
quite  seriously.  Indeed,  there  is  a  touch 
of  shrillness  about  the  whole  passage 
which  does  not  quite  explain  itself.  Bret 
Harte  had,  like  all  self-indulgent  and  sen- 
timental persons,  great  capacity  for  self- 
pity.  At  all  events,  after  triumphantly 
"standing"  his  expatriation  for  a  year,  he 
found  it  possible  to  stand  it  pretty  cheer- 
[55] 


BRET   HARTE 

fully  for  the  rest  of  his  life;  and  the  mo- 
ment at  which  he  could  think  of  sending 
for  his  family  was  postponed  with  equal 
success. 

The  vacation  for  which  he  had  so 
pleasantly  begun  to  plan  at  the  first  mo- 
ment of  his  consular  labours  was  soon 
effected.  A  month  later  he  is  writing 
from  Froude's  estate  in  Devonshire,  and 
the  letter  contains  a  fine  burst  of  enthu- 
siasm about  his  host: 

"But  Froude — dear  old  noble  fellow — 
is  splendid.  I  love  him  more  than  I  ever 
did  in  America.  He  is  great,  broad, 
manly — democratic  in  the  best  sense  of 
the  word,  scorning  all  sycophancy  and 
meanness,  accepting  all  that  is  around 
him,  yet  more  proud  of  his  literary  pro- 
[56] 


PERSONALITY 

f  ession  than  of  his  kinship  with  these  peo- 
ple whom  he  quietly  controls.  There  are 
only  a  few  literary  men  like  him  here,  but 
they  are  Kings.  I  could  not  have  had  a 
better  introduction  to  them  than  through 
Froude,  who  knows  them  all,  who  is  Ten- 
nyson's best  friend,  and  who  is  anxious  to 
make  my  entree  among  them  a  success." 

A  letter  written  shortly  after  from 
London  concludes:  "I  dare  not  go  with 
Osgood  to  Liverpool  for  fear  I  shall  get 
on  the  steamer  with  him  and  return ;  " 
whereupon  his  adoring  biographer  re- 
marks: "There  is  something  very  pathetic 
in  the  picture  of  the  man  whose  thoughts 
turned  to  the  West,  but  whose  duties 
pointed  to  the  East."  His  duties  at  the 
moment  pointed  somewhat  farther  east- 
[57] 


BRET   HARTE 

ward  than  London,  and  after  some  three 
months  more  of  vacation  he  did  make  his 
way  back  to  Crefeld. 

There  we  presently  behold  him,  become 
somewhat  domesticated  for  a  time,  taking 
observations  of  German  life,  making  a 
German  friend  or  two,  and  listening  to 
German  music.  Altogether  the  most 
spirited  passage  in  his  letters  of  this 
period  describes  his  first  impression  of 
Wagner,  of  the  probable  inadequacy  of 
which,  to  be  just,  he  seemed  quite  aware: 

"My  first  operatic  experience  was 
'Tannhauser.'  I  can  see  your  superior 
smile,  Anna,  at  this ;  and  I  know  how  you 
will  take  my  criticism  of  Wagner,  so  I 
don't  mind  saying  plainly  that  it  was  the 
most  diabolically  hideous  and  stupidly 
[58] 


PERSONALITY 

monotonous  performance  I  ever  heard. 
I  shall  say  nothing  about  the  orchestral 
harmonies,  for  there  wasn't  anything  go- 
ing on  of  that  kind,  unless  you  call  some- 
thing that  seemed  like  a  boiler  factory  at 
work  in  the  next  street,  and  the  wind 
whistling  through  the  rigging  of  a  chan- 
nel steamer,  harmony.  But  I  must  say 
one  thing!  In  the  third  act,  I  think, 
Tannhauser  and  two  other  minstrels  sing 
before  the  King  and  Court  to  the  accom- 
paniment of  their  harps — and  the  boiler 
factory.  Each  minstrel  sang,  or  rather 
declaimed,  something  like  the  multipli- 
cation table  for  about  twenty  minutes. 
Tannhauser,  when  his  turn  came,  de- 
claimed longer  and  more  lugubriously 
and  ponderously  and  monotonously  than 
[59] 


BRET   HARTE 

the  others,  and  went  into  'nine  times  nine 
are  eighty-one'  and  'ten  times  two  are 
twenty,'  when  suddenly,  when  they  had 
finished,  they  all  drew  their  swords  and 
rushed  at  him.  I  turned  to  Gen.  Von 
Rauch  and  said  to  him  that  'I  didn't  won- 
der at  it.'  'Ah,'  said  he,  'you  know  the 
story,  then?'  'No,  not  exactly,'  I  replied. 
'Ja  wohl,'  said  Von  Rauch,  'the  story  is 
that  these  minstrels  are  all  singing  in 
praise  of  Love,  but  they  are  furious  at 
Tannhauser,  who  loves  Hilda  the  Ger- 
man Venus,  for  singing  in  the  praise  of 
Love  so  wildly,  so  warmly,  so  passionate- 
ly: Then  I  concluded  that  I  really  did 
not  understand  Wagner." 

Bret  Harte,  we  find,  was  as  prone  to 
repeat  his  good  things  as  other  good  let- 
[60] 


PERSONALITY 

ter-writers.  In  an  early  letter  from  Cre- 
feld  he  says:  "I  know  now  from  my 
observations,  both  here  and  in  Paris  and 
London,  where  the  scene-painters  at  the 
theatres  get  their  subjects.  Those  impos- 
sible houses,  those  unreal,  silent  streets, 
all  exist  in  Europe."  Seventeen  years 
later,  during  his  last  visit  to  the  Conti- 
nent, he  is  struck  with  the  similar  spec- 
tacularity  of  the  Swiss  landscape,  and 
writes  (the  italics  are  his  own) : 

"This  part  of  Switzerland  is  entirely 
new  to  me.  I  can  only  tell  you  that  the 
two  photographs  I  send  you  are  abso- 
lutely true  in  detail  and  effect,  and  that 
the  characteristic,  and  even  the  defect,  of 
the  scenery  here  is  that  it  looks  as  if  it 
were  artistically  composed;  all  the  drop- 
[61] 


BRET   HARTE 

curtains,  all  the  stage  scenes,  all  the  ballet 
backgrounds  you  have  ever  seen  in  the 
theatre  exist  here  in  reality.  The  painter 
has  nothing  to  compose — the  photogra- 
pher still  less;  that  chalet,  that  terrace, 
that  snow-peak,  is  exactly  where  it  ought 
to  be.  The  view  from  my  balcony  at  this 
moment  is  a  picture  hanging  on  my  wall 
— not  a  view  at  all.  You  begin  to  have  a 
horrible  suspicion  that  Daudet's  joke 
about  all  'Switzerland  being  a  gigantic 
hotel  company'  is  true.  You  hesitate 
about  sitting  down  on  this  stone  terrace 
lest  it  shouldn't  be  'practical';  and  you 
don't  dare  knock  at  the  door  of  this  bright 
Venetian-awned  shop  lest  it  should  be  only 
painted  canvas.  There  is  a  whole  street 
in  Montreux  that  I  have  seen  a  dozen 
[62] 


PERSONALITY 

times  in  Grand  Opera.  The  people — 
tourists  of  all  nations  —  are  the  only 
things  real,  and  in  the  hotels,  when  they 
are  in  full-dress  on  the  balconies  or  sa- 
loons, they  look  like — the  audience!" 

During  his  first  stay  in  London,  Harte 
had  arranged  for  a  lecture  tour  in  Eng- 
land which  had  been  a  pecuniary  failure. 
A  second  experiment,  made  a  little  later, 
was  successful.  Apparently  he  had  only 
one  lecture,  which  he  called  "The  Argo- 
nauts of  '49,"  and  which  he  had  delivered 
many  times  in  America.  The  warmth 
with  which  he  was  received  by  English 
audiences,  as  well  as  by  English  society, 
probably  made  each  return  to  Crefeld 
more  difficult.  Some  seven  months  after 
his  appointment  he  writes: 
[63] 


BRET   HARTE 

"I  am  very  seriously  thinking  of  ask- 
ing the  department  to  change  my  loca- 
tion. Germany  is  no  place  for  me.  I 
feel  it  more  and  more  every  day.  So  that 
if  I  do  not  hold  out  any  hopes  to  you  it  is 
because  I  do  not  know  if  I  shall  stay  here. 
There  are  so  many  places  better  for  my 
health,  for  my  literary  plans,  for  my 
comfort,  and  for  my  purse  than  this.  I 
shall  write  quietly  to  one  or  two  of  my 
Washington  friends  to  see  if  it  can  be 
managed.  I  shall  have  made  a  good  head 
here;  by  good  luck,  I  fear,  more  than  by 
management.  The  consular  business  will 
exceed  this  year  any  previous  year,  and 
I  can  hand  over  to  the  Government  quite 
a  handsome  sum." 

Certainly  Germany  was  not  the  place 
[64] 


PERSONALITY 

for  him.  He  was  unacquainted  with  the 
language  and  literature,  and  unable  to 
grasp  the  German  point  of  view  and  way 
of  life.  Yet  his  work  was  extremely 
popular  in  Germany,  appearing  to  be,  in 
its  quality  of  sentiment,  singularly  intel- 
ligible to  the  Teutonic  mind.  "But  the 
Crefeld  invoices  were  not  to  hold  him 
long  in  thrall,"  says  the  biographer,  sym- 
pathetically. The  Washington  friends 
managed  a  transfer  to  Scotland,  and  for 
some  years  Harte  was  free  to  be  the  titu- 
lar thrall  of  the  Glasgow  invoices,  and, 
in  practice,  to  enjoy  the  ready  English 
hospitality  to  which  he  was  now  welcome. 
He  made  many  friends  among  distin- 
guished Englishmen,  and  in  fact  found 
a  place  in  the  society  of  London  such  as 
[65] 


BRET   HARTE 

seems  never  to  have  been  quite  open  to 
him  in  Boston  or  New  York;  a  not  un- 
common experience  for  brilliant  Ameri- 
cans abroad.  He  became  intimate  also 
with  two  literary  men,  with  whom  he  had 
much  in  common,  William  Black  and 
Walter  Besant;  was  entertained  by  the 
Lowells,  and  corresponded  with  by  John 
Hay;  and  there  was  never  a  break  in  his 
intimacy  with  Froude. 

He  formed  an  even  closer  intimacy  with 
Monsieur  and  Madame  Van  de  Velde 
— the  former  of  the  Belgian  diplomatic 
corps,  the  latter  apparently  a  clever  wom- 
an of  the  world.  In  her  house  and  in  the 
presence  of  herself  "and  her  attendants," 
according  to  the  English  chronicler,  Bret 
Harte  died.  His  wife  and  children  were 
[66] 


PERSONALITY 

present  at  the  funeral,  some  days  later. 
A  newspaper  letter  of  Madame  Van  de 
Velde's  is  worth  quoting,  as  it  explains 
the  English  attitude  toward  this  Ameri- 
can author,  and  as  it  throws  light  upon 
his  own  character  as  others  saw  it: 

"It  is  difficult  for  an  observant 
stranger  to  pass  even  a  short  time  in 
Great  Britain  without  becoming  aware  of 
a  distinctively  characteristic  trait  in  the 
inhabitants,  and  it  is  impossible  for  any- 
one who  has  lived  a  number  of  years  there 
not  to  be  absolutely  convinced  of  its 
dominance.  The  Englishman,  in  his  cold, 
undemonstrative  fashion,  is  intensely  pa- 
triotic; in  his  heart  of  hearts  he  firmly 
believes  that  in  the  scheme  of  creation  he 
was  formed  out  of  special  clay,  while  the 
[67] 


BRET   HARTE 

remainder  of  human  beings  have  been 
moulded  from  a  much  inferior  material. 
He  is  equally  sure  that  no  effort  of  grace 
can  ever  raise  the  alien  to  his  level;  but, 
while  he  is  piously  grateful  for  this  dis- 
pensation of  Providence,  he  recognises 
and  appreciates  the  right  of  an  outsider 
to  maintain  an  exalted  opinion  of  his  own 
country  and  nationality;  he  respects  him 
for  it  even  when  he  endeavours  to  prove 
it  erroneous;  nay,  more,  should  his  argu- 
ments successfully  establish  a  recognition 
of  his  own  superiority,  he  immediately 
ceases  to  entertain  regard  and  toleration 
for  the  too  easily  persuaded  stranger. 
This  thoroughly  English  and  so  far  hon- 
ourable peculiarity  is  one  of  the  reasons, 
apart  from  his  merits  as  a  literary  celeb- 
[68] 


PERSONALITY 

rity,  why  Bret  Harte  is  extremely  popu- 
lar in  England,  and  has  always  been  so. 
"Before  he  took  up  his  residence  in 
London  his  genius  and  originality  had 
won  him  admirers,  but  when  he  gave  them 
the  opportunity  of  becoming  acquainted 
with  the  man,  independently,  as  it  were, 
of  the  author,  they  promptly  ascertained 
that  no  more  uncompromising  American 
had  ever  set  foot  among  them.  Time  has 
not  dulled  Bret  Harte's  instinctive  af- 
fection for  the  land  of  his  birth,  for  its 
institutions,  its  climate,  its  natural  beau- 
ties, and,  above  all,  its  character  and 
moral  attributes  of  its  inhabitants.  Even 
his  association  with  the  aristocratic  repre- 
sentatives of  London  society  has  been 
impotent  to  modify  his  views  or  to  win 
[69] 


BRET   HARTE 

him  over  to  less  independent  professions. 
He  is  as  single-minded  to-day  as  he  was 
when  he  first  landed  on  British  soil.  A 
general  favourite  in  the  most  diverse  cir- 
cles, social,  literary,  scientific,  artistic,  or 
military,  his  strong  primitive  nature  and 
his  positive  individuality  have  remained 
intact.  Always  polite  and  gentle,  neither 
seeking  nor  evading  controversy,  he  is 
steadfastly  unchangeable  in  his  political 
and  patriotic  beliefs.  He  has  frequently 
been  heard  to  express  himself  frankly  on 
the  vexed  question  of  Anglo-American 
marriages,  severely  satirising  those  of  his 
fair  compatriots  who,  dazzled  by  the  lus- 
tre of  lordly  alliances,  have  too  closely 
assimilated  with  the  land  of  their  adop- 
tion, and  apparently  forgotten  their 
[70] 


PERSONALITY 

country.    To  such  he  has  not  hesitated  to 
apply  the  term  of  'apostates.'    .    .    . 

"It  has  been  several  times  remarked 
that  the  appearance  of  Bret  Harte  does 
not  coincide  with  the  preconceived  ex- 
pectations of  his  readers.  They  had 
formed  a  vague,  intangible  idea  of  a 
wild,  reckless  Californian,  impatient  of 
social  trammels,  whose  life  among  the 
Argonauts  must  have  fashioned  him 
after  a  type  differing  widely  from  the 
reality.  These  idealists  were  partly  dis- 
appointed, partly  relieved,  when  their 
American  visitor  turned  out  to  be  a  quiet, 
low-voiced,  easy-mannered,  polished  gen- 
tleman, who,  smiling,  confessed  that  pre- 
cisely because  he  had  roughed  it  a  good 
deal  in  his  youth  he  was  inclined  to  enjoy 
[71] 


BRET   HARTE 

the  comforts  and  avail  himself  of  the 
facilities  of  an  older  civilisation  when 
placed  within  his  reach.  He  also  gently 
intimated  that  days  on  the  top  of  a  stage- 
coach, or  on  the  back  of  a  mustang,  and 
nights  spent  at  poker,  would  not  materi- 
ally assist  in  the  writing  of  stories  which 
are  never  produced  fast  enough  to  merit 
the  demand. 

"The  American  humourist  has  been 
represented  as  sinking  into  the  slough 
of  sybaritic  idleness;  as  working  five 
hours  before  breakfast  and  recruiting  by 
violent  pedestrian  exercise;  he  changed 
his  clothes  six  times  a  day;  he  neglected 
his  personal  appearance;  he  has  taken  a 
big  mansion  in  Norfolk  and  entertained 
on  a  large  scale;  he  had  hidden  himself 
[72] 


PERSONALITY 

in  a  small  cottage  in  the  suburbs ;  he  filled 
waste-paper  baskets  with  torn  notes  of 
invitations;  he  wrote  sheets  and  sheets 
of  copy;  society  women  booked  him 
months  ahead  to  secure  his  presence  at 
their  receptions;  he  made  thousands  of 
pounds  a  year;  he  had  ceased  to  write 
at  all;  he  had  become  'quite  English, 
you  know/  and  had  formally  adjured 
America. 

"Singularly  enough,  many  of  Bret 
Harte's  countrymen  in  London  did  not 
take  the  trouble  to  verify  these  state- 
ments; they  accepted  them  blindly,  and 
thus  they  may  have  been  reproduced  in 
some  American  newspapers,  together 
with  the  account  of  the  last  debut  of  a 
brilliant  New  York  belle  in  London,  or 
[73] 


BRET   HARTE 

the  detailed  description  of  some  million- 
aire's festival.     .     .     . 

"It  has  been  said  that  Bret  Harte's  sto- 
ries fetch  bigger  prices  in  the  market  than 
any  similar  form  of  literature  of  the  pres- 
ent day.  This  is  perhaps  correct,  but  he 
does  not  consider  himself  justified  on  that 
account  in  relaxing  his  labours.  He  has 
obligations  in  America,  and  this  claim 
upon  him  forms  at  once  the  motive  and 
the  reason  of  his  prolonged  stay  in  Eng- 
land, in  spite  of  the  inclination  and  desire 
so  strong  in  his  heart  to  revisit  his  native 
land. 

"Bret  Harte  has  more  than  once  been 

asked  to  lecture  in  England  on  English 

customs  and  English  society,  but  he  has 

always  demurred.    He  is  too  grateful  for 

[74] 


PERSONALITY 

the  welcome  tendered  to  him  to  risk  re- 
paying it  with  apparent  discourtesy  of 
censure;  he  is  too  honest  and  frank  to 
give  indiscriminate  praise  or  to  lay  him- 
self open  to  the  reproach  of  flattery. 
Some  day  he  may  be  persuaded  to  give 
the  world  the  result  of  close,  keen,  and 
impartial  observations,  and  we  dare  say 
he  will  do  so  in  the  spirit  of  conscientious- 
ness and  sincerity  so  characteristic  of  all 
his  writings." 

Of  Bret  Harte's  modesty  it  is  neces- 
sary to  say  this:  that  while  it  is  undoubt- 
edly true  that  he  shrank  from  public 
attentions  requiring  his  presence  and  ex- 
ertion— while  he  hated  to  be  talked  at  by 
strangers,  and  to  talk  to  strangers  of 
himself — he  took  his  own  product,  to  the 
[75] 


BRET   HARTE 

very  end,  with  quite  sufficient  seriousness. 
He  did  not  like  to  lecture,  he  did  not  like 
to  make  after-dinner  speeches,  but  he  did 
thoroughly  enjoy  adulation  of  a  proper 
and  private  sort.  There  is  no  evidence 
that  he  realised  the  artistic  futility  of 
trading  upon  his  early  success  in  the  in- 
terpretation of  Californian  life,  or  that 
he  recognised  the  failure  of  his  occasional 
attempts  to  interpret  other  phases  of  life. 
Why  should  he?  Periodicals  and  pub- 
lishers, for  thirty  years,  besieged  him  with 
orders  for  stories,  to  which,  in  his  own 
time  and  to  his  own  profit,  he  paid  the 
proper  tribute  of  obedience. 

As  for  his  patriotism,  it  need  only  be 
said  that  it  was  of  the  amiably  trucu- 
lent sort  which  is  expected  of  the  Amer- 
[76] 


PERSONALITY 

lean  abroad.  That  he  ever  seriously  de- 
sired to  return  to  America  is  a  point  of 
mere  surmise.  He  was  having  a  very 
comfortable  existence  in  England.  He 
could  command  in  America  neither  the 
social  nor  the  literary  standing  which 
England  was  glad  to  give  him.  From 
his  wife  and  family  (when  Madame  Van 
de  Velde  wrote)  he  had  been  for  some 
time  estranged.  The  line  of  least  re- 
sistance did  not  run  westward  from  Liv- 
erpool. 

There  is,  in  fine,  no  doubt  that  Bret 
Harte  was,  to  casual  friends  and  ac- 
quaintances, an  amiable  and  companion- 
able person.  Nobody  has  ever  alleged 
that  he  had  vices,  unless  weakness  is  a 
vice;  and  an  amiable  weakness,  a  willing- 
[77] 


BRET   HARTE 

ness  to  give  his  friends  and  his  public 
what  they  desired,  characterised  his  life 
and  his  artistic  career.  The  life  of  Eng- 
lish clubs  and  country-houses  evidently 
demanded  nothing  which  he  was  not  able 
to  give,  and  his  public  was,  unfortunate- 
ly, not  exacting.  So  far  as  it  was  Eng- 
lish, it  had  a  pretty  vague  notion  of  the 
veracity  of  his  replicas  of  the  early  Cali- 
fornian  sketches.  Nor  was  judgment  in 
the  Eastern  States  of  America  greatly 
more  discriminating.  The  man  had  not 
only  no  trouble  in  disposing  of  his  wares ; 
he  had  more  "orders"  than  he  could  fill. 
So  he  went  down  in  comfort  to  the  grave, 
and  his  most  charitable  epitaph  would  in- 
clude, in  some  form,  the  statement  that, 
though  his  only  inspiration  was  outlived 
[78] 


PERSONALITY 

by  more  than  thirty  years,  that  was  not, 
directly,  his  fault;  and  the  remark  might 
fairly  be  appended  that  a  single  inspira- 
tion, a  single  moment  of  supreme  sin- 
cerity, is  more  than  is  allotted  to  one  in  a 
million  of  our  admirable  and  progressive 
species. 


[79] 


Ill 

WORK 

It  was  apparently  a  good-fortune  which 
led  Bret  Harte  to  the  field  of  his  one 
notable  success,  and  an  ill-fortune  which 
led  him  away  from  it;  but  there  is  a 
tide  in  the  affairs  of  men,  and  certainly 
in  this  case  the  important  fact  is  not  that 
the  moment  of  flood  came  so  early  and 
was  so  brief,  but  that  the  man  was,  after 
all,  able  to  seize  and  make  the  most  of  it. 
With  the  appearance  of  "The  Luck 
of  Roaring  Camp"  began  the  single 
period  in  his  life  which  one  studies  with 
almost  unqualified  satisfaction,  the  pe- 
riod during  which,  both  as  man  and  as 
artist,  his  integrity  maintained  itself 
quite  above  fear  and  above  reproach. 
[80] 


WORK 
The  immediate  SCIL  ^tion  created  by    The 

Luck"   has^   as   some '"one   has   said,  fno 
_/ 

parallel  in  the  history  of  English  fiction^ 
except  in  the  instances  of  "Waverley" 
and  "Pickwick."  !  No  other  short  story 
ever  leaped  so  suddenly  into  what  proved 
to  be  permanent  fame.  Of  course  the 
novelty  of  its  theme  had  much  to  do  with 
its  first  success.  The  pursuit  of  local 
colour  and  the  local  type  was  a  compara- 
tively new  chase,  and  hardly  before  or 
since  have  colour  and  type  offered  them- 
selves so  glowing  and  salient  as  in  the 
California  which  Bret  Harte  knew.)  But 
fidelity  to  the  local  fact  is  a  subordinate 
virtue  in  the  practice  of  fiction,  and  it 
may  well  be  that  the  public  which  was 
startled  and  delighted  by  Harte's  early 
[81] 


BRET   HARTE 

tales  fancied  a  charm  :n  the  accessories  of 
his  art  which  T"  -Hy  inhered  in  its  sub- 
stance. They  were  fascinated  not  more 
by  the  oddity  of  the  theme  than  by  the 
author's  unmoral  attitude  toward  it;  and 
if  in  his  later  work  there  came  to  be  some- 
thing a  little  conscious,  even  spectacular, 
in  his  maintenance  of  that  attitude,  the 
fact  was  evidently  due  to  the  belabouring 
he  had  received  at  the  hands  of  well- 
meaning  moral  persons.  Eventually  he 
thought  it  worth  while  to  formulate  a  de- 
fence of  what  had  been  in  the  beginning 
an  instinctive  point  of  view: 

"He  (the  author)  has  been  repeatedly 
cautioned,  kindly  and  unkindly,   intelli- 
gently  and   unintelligently,    against   his 
alleged  tendency  to  confuse  recognised 
[82] 


WORK 

standards  of  morality  by  extenuating 
lives  of  recklessness,  and  often  criminal- 
ity, with  a  single  solitary  virtue.  He 
might  easily  show  that  he  has  never  writ- 
ten a  sermon,  that  he  has  never  moralised 
or  commented  upon  the  actions  of  his 
heroes,  that  he  has  never  voiced  a  creed 
or  obtrusively  demonstrated  an  ethical 
opinion.  He  might  easily  allege  that  this 
merciful  effect  of  his  art  arose  from  the 
reader's  weak  human  sympathies,  and 
hold  himself  irresponsible.  But  he  would 
be  conscious  of  a  more  miserable  weakness 
in  thus  divorcing  himself  from  his  fellow- 
men  who  in  the  domain  of  art  must  ever 
walk  hand  in  hand  with  him.  So  he  pre- 
fers to  say  that,  of  all  the  various  forms 
in  which  cant  presents  itself  to  suffering 
[83] 


BRET   HARTE 

humanity,  he  knows  of  none  so  outra- 
geous, so  illogical,  so  undemonstrable,  so 
marvellously  absurd,  as  the  cant  of  'Too 
Much  Mercy.'  When  it  shall  be  proven 
to  him  that  communities  are  degraded 
and  brought  to  guilt  and  crime,  suffering 
or  destitution,  from  a  predominance  of 
this  quality;  when  he  shall  see  pardoned 
ticket-of -leave  men  elbowing  men  of  aus- 
tere lives  out  of  situation  and  position, 
and  the  repentant  Magdalen  supplant- 
ing the  blameless  virgin  in  society — then 
he  will  lay  aside  his  pen  and  extend  his 
hand  to  the  new  Draconian  discipline  in 
fiction.  But  until  then  he  will,  without 
claiming  to  be  a  religious  man  or  a  moral- 
ist, but  simply  as  an  artist,  reverently  and 
humbly  conform  to  the  rules  laid  down 
[84] 


WORK 

by  a  Great  Poet  who  created  the  parable 
of  the  'Prodigal  Son'  and  the  'Good 
Samaritan,'  whose  works  have  lasted 
eighteen  hundred  years,  and  will  remain 
when  the  present  writer  and  his  genera- 
tion are  forgotten." 

One  reads  this  passage  with  qualified 
satisfaction.  Based  upon  a  right  feeling 
of  indignation,  it  succeeds  in  being  both 
didactic  and  sentimental.  When  Bret 
Harte  wrote  "The  Luck  of  Roaring 
Camp"  and  "The  Outcasts  of  Poker 
Flat"  he  had  a  strong  instinct  to  tell  the 
bare  truth  about  human  life  as  he  knew 
it  in  California.  He  had  also,  for  better 
or  worse,  a  decided  instinct  to  invest  hu- 
man nature,  in  whatsoever  dubious  guise 
he  might  find  it,  with  certain  attributes  of 

[85] 


BRET   HARTE 

ideal  grace.  The  resultant  of  these  two 
impulses  was  sometimes  effective,  some- 
times merely  confusing. 

Apart  from  questions  of  substance  and 
morals,  these  first  stories  possessed  an- 
other claim  upon  public  interest.  The 
writer  had  an  unmistakable  touch  of  his 
own.  It  is  during  this  period  that  we 
feel  sure  of  the  sincerity  of  this  touch; 
the  earlier  stories  are  patent  imitations  of 
Irving  and  Dickens,  and  the  later,  most  of 
them,  are  as  patent  imitations  of  himself. 

It  is  not  generally  known  that  Bret 
Harte  had  been,  long  before  he  received 
Mr.  Fields's  letter  about  "The  Luck,"  a 
contributor  to  The  Atlantic.  As  early  as 
1863  "The  Legend  of  Monte  del  Diablo" 
[86] 


WORK 

had  appeared  in  its  columns.  It  was  a 
graceful  and  spirited  sketch,  but  one  can 
understand  easily  enough  why  neither  this 
Spanish- American  tale  nor  its  subsequent 
companions  in  the  same  vein  excited  any 
especial  interest.  They  are  obviously  and 
successfully  imitative  of  Irving,  not  only 
in  their  general  atmosphere  and  treat- 
ment, but  in  their  very  idioms  and  ca- 
dences. Just  as  in  his  earlier  character- 
stories  Bret  Harte  instinctively  imitated 
Dickens,  in  these  sketches  he  insensibly 
fell  into  the  mood  and  manner  of  the 
chronicler  of  the  Alhambra,  whose  spell 
was  still  fresh  upon  the  world. 

Here,  for  example,  is  the  opening  pas- 
sage from  "The  Legend  of  Monte  del 
Diablo": 

[87] 


BRET   HARTE 

"For  many  years  after  Father  Juni- 
pero  Serro  first  rang  his  bell  in  the  wil- 
derness of  Upper  California,  the  spirit 
which  animated  that  adventurous  priest 
did  not  wane.  The  conversion  of  the 
heathen  went  on  rapidly  in  the  establish- 
ment of  missions  throughout  the  land. 
So  sedulously  did  the  good  Fathers  set 
about  their  work  that  around  their  iso- 
lated chapels  there  presently  arose  adobe 
huts,  whose  mud-plastered  and  savage 
tenants  partook  regularly  of  the  provi- 
sions, and  occasionally  of  the  Sacrament, 
of  their  pious  hosts.  Nay,  so  great  was 
their  progress,  that  one  zealous  Padre  is 
reported  to  have  administered  the  Lord's 
Supper  on  Sabbath  morning  to  'over 
three  hundred  heathen  salvages.'  It  was 
[88] 


WORK 

not  to  be  wondered  that  the  Enemy  of 
Souls,  being  greatly  incensed  thereat,  and 
alarmed  at  his  decreasing  popularity, 
should  have  grievously  tempted  and  em- 
barrassed these  holy  Fathers,  as  we  shall 
presently  see. 

"Yet  they  were  happy,  peaceful  days 
for  California.  The  vagrant  keels  of 
prying  Commerce  had  not  as  yet  ruffled 
the  lordly  gravity  of  her  bays.  No  torn 
and  ragged  gulch  betrayed  the  suspicion 
of  golden  treasure.  The  wild  oats 
drooped  idly  in  the  morning  heat  or 
wrestled  with  the  afternoon  breezes. 
Deer  and  antelope  dotted  the  plain.  The 
water-courses  brawled  in  their  familiar 
channels,  nor  dreamed  of  shifting  their 
regular  tide.  The  wonders  of  the  Yo- 
[89] 


BRET   HARTE 

Semite  and  Calaveras  were  as  yet  unre- 
corded. The  holy  Fathers  noted  little  of 
the  landscape  beyond  the  barbaric  prodi- 
gality with  which  the  quick  soil  repaid  the 
sowing.  A  new  conversion,  the  advent  of 
a  saint's  day,  or  the  baptism  of  an  Indian 
baby  was  at  once  the  chronicle  and  marvel 
of  their  day. 

"At  this  blissful  epoch  there  lived  at 
the  Mission  of  San  Pablo  Father  Jose 
Antonio  Haro,  a  worthy  brother  of  the 
Society  of  Jesus.  He  was  of  tall  and 
cadaverous  aspect.  A  somewhat  roman- 
tic history  had  given  a  poetic  interest  to 
his  lugubrious  visage.  While  a  youth, 
pursuing  his  studies  at  famous  Sala- 
manca, he  had  become  enamoured  of  the 
charms  of  Dona  Carmen  de  Torrence- 
[90] 


WORK 

vara  as  that  lady  passed  to  her  matutinal 
devotions.  Untoward  circumstances,  has- 
tened perhaps  by  a  wealthier  suitor, 
brought  this  amour  to  a  disastrous  issue, 
and  Father  Jose  entered  a  monastery, 
taking  upon  himself  the  vows  of  celibacy. 
It  was  here  that  his  natural  fervour  and 
poetic  enthusiasm  conceived  expression  as 
a  missionary.  A  longing  to  convert  the 
uncivilised  heathen  succeeded  his  frivolous 
earthly  passion,  and  a  desire  to  explore 
and  develop  unknown  fastnesses  continu- 
ally possessed  him.  In  his  flashing  eye 
and  sombre  exterior  was  detected  a  sin- 
gular commingling  of  the  discreet  Las 
Casas  and  the  impetuous  Balboa." 

The  early  stories  of  modern  California 
life  are  as  clearly  studies  after  Dickens. 
[91] 


BRET   HARTE 

Here,  for  instance,  is  a  bit  of  dialogue 
from  "M'liss,"  which  was  written  while 
Harte  was  still  a  compositor  on  The 
Golden  Era: 

"Suddenly  she  threw  herself  forward, 
calling  on  God  to  strike  her  dead,  and  fell 
quite  weak  and  helpless  with  her  face  on 
the  master's  desk,  crying  and  sobbing  as 
if  her  heart  would  break. 

"The  master  lifted  her  gently,  and 
waited  for  the  paroxysm  to  pass.  When, 
with  face  still  averted,  she  was  repeating 
between  her  sobs  the  mea  culpa  of  child- 
ish penitence — that  'she'd  be  good,  she 
didn't  mean  to,'  etc. — it  came  to  him  to 
ask  her  why  she  had  left  Sabbath-school. 

"Why   had    she    left    Sabbath-school? 
Why?    Oh,  yes.    What  did  he  (McSnag- 
[92] 


WORK 

ley)  want  to  tell  her  she  was  wicked  for? 
What  did  he  tell  her  God  hated  her  for? 
If  God  hated  her,  what  did  she  want  to 
go  to  Sabbath-school  for?  She  didn't 
want  to  be  beholden  to  anybody  who 
hated  her. 

"Had  she  told  McSnagley  this? 

"Yes,  she  had. 

"The  master  laughed.  It  was  a  hearty 
laugh,  and  echoed  so  oddly  in  the  little 
school-house,  and  seemed  so  inconsistent 
and  discordant  with  the  sighing  of  the 
pines  without,  that  he  shortly  corrected 
himself  with  a  sigh.  The  sigh  was  quite 
as  sincere  in  its  way,  however,  and  after 
a  moment  of  serious  silence  he  asked 
about  her  father. 

"Her  father.     What  father?     Whose 
[93] 


BRET   HARTE 

father?  What  had  he  ever  done  for  her? 
Why  did  the  girls  hate  her?  Come,  now! 
What  made  the  folks  say,  'Old  Bummer 
Smith's  M'liss,'  when  she  passed?  Yes; 
oh,  yes.  She  wished  he  was  dead — she 
was  dead — everybody  was  dead;  and  her 
sobs  broke  forth  anew." 

Harte's  mimetic  faculty  was  already 
being  deliberately  exercised,  as  the  "Con- 
densed Novels,"  published  in  1867, 
showed.  We  may,  in  this  connection, 
quote  the  opening  paragraphs  of  his  de- 
liberate parody  of  Dickens,  which  he 
called,  "The  Haunted  Man:  A  Christmas 
Story": 

"Don't  tell  me  that  it  wasn't  a  knocker. 
I  had  seen  it  often  enough,  and  I  ought 
to  know.    So  ought  the  three  o'clock  beer, 
[94] 


WORK 

in  dirty  high-lows,  swinging  himself  over 
the  railing,  or  executing  a  demoniacal  jig 
upon  the  door-step ;  so  ought  the  butcher, 
although  butchers  as  a  general  thing  are 
scornful  of  such  trifles ;  so  ought  the  post- 
man, to  whom  knockers  of  the  most  ex- 
travagant description  were  merely  human 
weaknesses,  that  were  to  be  pitied  and 
used.  And  so  ought  for  the  matter  of 
that,  etc.,  etc.,  etc. 

"  But  then  it  was  such  a  knocker.  A 
wild,  extravagant,  and  utterly  incompre- 
hensible knocker.  A  knocker  so  mysteri- 
ous and  suspicious  that  policeman  437, 
first  coming  upon  it,  felt  inclined  to  take 
it  instantly  in  custody,  but  compromised 
with  his  professional  instincts  by  sharply 
and  sternly  noting  it  with  an  eye  that  ad- 
[95] 


BRET   HARTE 

mitted  of  no  nonsense,  but  confidently 
expected  to  detect  its  secret  yet.  An  ugly 
knocker;  a  knocker  with  a  hard,  human 
face,  that  was  a  type  of  the  harder  human 
face  within.  A  human  face  that  held  be- 
tween its  teeth  a  brazen  rod.  So  here- 
after, in  the  mysterious  future,  should  be 
held,  etc.,  etc. 

"But  if  the  knocker  had  a  fierce  human 
aspect  in  the  glare  of  day,  you  should 
have  seen  it  at  night,  when  it  peered  out 
of  the  gathering  shadows  and  suggested 
an  ambushed  figure ;  when  the  light  of  the 
street-lamps  fell  upon  it,  and  wrought  a 
play  of  sinister  expression  in  its  hard  out- 
lines; when  it  seemed  to  wink  meaningly 
at  a  shrouded  figure  who,  as  the  night  fell 
darkly,  crept  up  the  steps  and  passed  into 
[96] 


WORK 

the  mysterious  house;  when  the  swinging 
door  disclosed  a  back  passage  into  which 
the  figure  seemed  to  lose  itself  and  be- 
come a  part  of  the  mysterious  gloom; 
when  the  night  grew  boisterous  and  the 
fierce  wind  made  furious  charges  at  the 
knocker,  as  if  to  wrench  it  off  and  carry 
it  away  in  triumph.  Such  a  night  as  this. 
"It  was  a  wild  and  pitiless  wind.  A 
wind  that  had  commenced  life  as  a  gentle 
country  zephyr,  but,  wandering  through 
manufacturing  towns,  had  become  de- 
moralised, and,  reaching  the  city,  had 
plunged  into  extravagant  dissipation  and 
wild  excesses.  A  roistering  wind  that  in- 
dulged in  Bacchanalian  shouts  on  the 
street-corners,  that  knocked  off  the  hats 
from  the  heads  of  helpless  passengers,  and 
[97] 


BRET   HARTE 

then  fulfilled  its  duties  by  speeding  away, 
like  all  young  prodigals — to  sea." 

This  is  a  purer  example  of  parody  than 
Bret  Harte  commonly  produced.  As  a 
rule  his  imitations  are  of  the  broad  bur- 
lesque order,  when  they  are  not  the  in- 
struments of  satire. 

We  have  taken  pains  to  note  how 
closely  a  young  writer  reproduced  the 
style  of  the  two  popular  authors  to  whom 
he  was  most  nearly  akin  in  tempera- 
ment. But  there  was  nothing  strange 
in  this:  the  odd  thing  is  that  he  should 
have  somewhat  abruptly  emerged  from 
this  imitative  habit  with  a  style  of  his  own. 
It  was  never  an  altogether  pure  or  good 
style.  That  was  a  day  of  loose  and 
[98] 


WORK 

"picturesque"  writing,  and  Bret  Harte, 
with  his  journalistic  training  and  self- 
cultivated  taste,  was  not  exempt  from  the 
vices  of  the  period.  But  in  that  best  mood 
of  his,  his  style  did  possess  a  primary  in- 
tegrity; it  did  express  the  writer  as  he 
was.  So  far  as  the  faculty  of  expressing 
his  own  personality  could  so  constitute 
him,  Bret  Harte  was  an  artist:  not  of  the 
most  refined  type,  for  his  nature  was  not 
of  marked  refinement;  not  of  the  most 
powerful  type,  for  he  was  not  a  great 
man. 

He  is  said  to  have  taken  great  pains 
with  the  form  of  his  work.  "His  writing 
materials,"  says  Mr.  Noah  Brooks,  "the 
light  and  heat,  and  even  the  adjustment 
of  the  furniture  of  the  writing-room, 
[99] 


BRET   HARTE 

must  be  as  he  desired,  otherwise  he  could 
not  get  on  with  his  work.  Even  when 
his  environment  was  all  that  he  could 
wish,  there  were  times  when  the  divine 
afflatus  would  not  come  and  the  day's 
work  must  be  abandoned." 

Mr.  C.  W.  Stoddard,  another  friend 
of  the  California  days,  gives  similar  tes- 
timony: "One  day  I  found  him  pacing 
the  floor  of  his  office,  knitting  his  brows 
and  staring  at  vacancy.  I  considered 
why.  He  was  watching  and  waiting  for 
a  word,  the  right  word,  the  one  word  to 
fit  into  a  line  of  recently  written  prose. 
I  suggested  one:  it  would  not  answer;  it 
must  be  a  word  of  two  syllables,  or  the 
natural  rhythm  of  the  sentence  would 
suffer.  Thus  he  perfected  his  prose." 
[100] 


WORK 

All  this  is  doubtless  true;  yet  the  fact 
remains  that  Bret  Harte  never  compassed 
a  pure  style.  With  all  his  efforts  tow- 
ard form  he  never  could  make  himself  a 
writer  of  distinction.  His  style  lacks 
firmness  and  consistency  much  as  jiis  life 
lacked  these  qualities;  it  lacks  refinement, 
precisely  as  his  nature  lacked  refinement. 
With  all  his  particularity  injbhe  cholce^of 
words  he  could  only  use  them  as  counters. 
He  had  no  sense  of  language  as  an  or- 
ganism,  and_his  diction  is  consequently 
often  conventional,  inflated,  or_  coarse.. 
The  same  thing  is  true  with  regard  to 
larger  questions  of  treatment.  What  (to 
cite  a  single  instance)  could  be  more  pop- 
ularly effective,  what  could  be  in  worse 
taste,  than  the  melodr,ainatic  denouement 
L01] 


BRET   HARTE 

of  "The  Luck  of  Roaring  Camp,"  other- 
wise so  masterly  a  sketch?  There  is  a 
similar  touch  of  conventionality  in  the 
ending  of  "Tennessee's  Partner,"  and  of 
more  than  one  other  of  the  famous  early 
stories.  They  have,  in  fact,  a  dual  and 
somewhat  conflicting  character  as  sketches 
and  as  tales.  Harte  wished  to  record  the 
truth,  but  it  was  his  instinct  to  give  the 
truth  a  conventionally  ideal  turn;  and 
perhaps  the  commentator  who  called  him 
a  "realistic  idealist"  came  about  as  near 
classifying  him  as  one  can  come. 

In  his  treatment  of  character  we  are 
confronted  with  the  same  puzzling  con- 
trasts between  the  sincere  and  the  mere- 
tricious. What  characterisation  more 
fine,  strong,  and  simple  than  that  of 
[102] 


WORK 

M'liss,  Yuba  Bill,  Tennessee's  Partner, 
and  Higgles?  What  more  set  and  mere- 
tricious than  that  of  the  Oakhursts,  Star- 
bottles,  Hamlins,  and  the  procession  of 
furbelowed  creatures,  all  eyes  and  ankles, 
who  represent  Bret  Harte's  conception  of 
womanhood?  It  has  been  often  asserted 
not^only  that  Harte  was  a  great  artist,  but 
that  he  was  a  great  student  of  character. 
In  both  instances  his  achievement  was  in- 
evitably compromised  by  the  limitations 
of  his  personality.  A  certain  direct,  hu- 
mourous acceptance  of  the  ruder  condi- 
tions of  frontier  life  seems  to  have  been 
his  most  valuable  asset :  this  and  a  remark- 
able instinctive  faculty  for  conveying  his 
impressions.  He  was,  however,  keen  to 
see  what  was  picturesque  and  spectacular 

[103] 


BRET   HARTE 

in  the  more  complex  aspects  of  that  life; 
and  this  impression,  for  whatever  it  might 
be  worth,  he  was  also  able  to  convey.  He 
worked,  in  short,  under  that  complication 
of  motives  which  has  proved  the  undoing 
of  so  many  born  story-writers :  the  instinct 
to  portray  and  the  instinct  to  amuse.  In 
the  end — and,  alas,  long  before  the  end — 
the  latter  instinct  was  completely  vic- 
torious. 

According  to  his  own  account,  it  was 
his  purpose  from  the  outset  to  aid  in 
founding  "a  distinctive  Western  Ameri- 
can literature,"  and  he  appears  to  have 
thought  that  he  had  actually  achieved 
this.  IJisJtr^aimerrtjD^^ 
Jack  Hamlin  suggests  very  well  his  liny 
itation  as  an  interpreter  of  Western  life. 

[  ID*  ;T 


WORK 

The_spirit^of  the  mining  camp  he  cer- 
tainly did  embody  in  literature.  Other- 
wise, he  was  interested  in  the  people  who 
live  in  the  Far  West,  and  in  the  things 
which  happen  there,  as  a  connoisseur  in 
the  materials  of  fiction  rather  than  as  a 
passionate  student.  We  do  not,  of  course, 
ask  for  statistics,  or  a  complete  philos- 
ophy, or  a  long  face,  from  the  creative 
artist.  Mr.  Owen  Wister  has  offered  us 
none  of  these  things.  .  Yet  by  his  interpre- 
tation of  ranch  life  he  has  contrived,  in 
the  very  act  of  pleasing  us,  to  make  us 
think.  Bret  Harte  was  content  to  make 
us  wonder.  He  was  not  greatly  con- 
cerned that  his  reading  of  that  life  should 
be  profoundly  significant;  it  must  be  pic- 
turesque. Mr.  Jack  Hamlin  is  a  rascal 
[105] 


BRET   HARTE 

under  a  film  of  smooth  manners.  .JLart 
oilhis  attractiveness  consists  in  our  knowl- 
edge  of  his  rascality,  a  lure  a  good  many 
centuries  older  than  Jack  Hamlin  or  Jack 
Sheppard.  Owen  Wister's  Virginian  is 
a  gentleman  under  a  coat  of  roughness. 
This  also  is  an  immemorial  type  of  hero. 
So  far  as  they  are  private  persons,  it  is 
proper  that  we  should  get  as  much  pleas- 
ure out  of  one  type  as  out  of  the  other. 
But  we  can,  after  all,  hardly  yield  to  Jack 
Hamlin  and  the  Virginian  the  immunities 
of  private  life.  If  the  phenomena  of  the 
West  really  interest  us,  we  shall  find  our- 
selves considering  the  claims  of  each  in 
turn  to  be  taken  as  representative  of  the 
frontier  phase  of  civilisation.  Weighed 
in  such  a  mood,  Mr.  Jack  Hamlin,  with 
[106] 


WORK 

all  his  fascinations,  is  found  wanting; 
one  must  be  lightly  pleased  with  him,  or 
not  at  all.  The  Virginian  (who  Will  never 
become  as  famous  as  Mr.  Hamlin)  is  far 
more  edifying;  he  is  much  more  nearly  in 
the  line  of  descent  from  those  strong  fron- 
tiersmen of  Bret  Harte's  earliest  work. 

Even  that  work  was  not,  it  is  plain, 
based  upon  a  conscious  philosophy.  He 
had  no  faculty  of  subtle  analysis ;  he  did 
have  a  crude,  strong  understanding  of 
the^crude,  strong^ frontier  life.  The  fla- 
vour of  that  life  has  best  been  suggested, 
so  far  as  generalisation  is  concerned,  by 
a  dweller  in  the  Bret  Harte  country: 
"Somehow  the  rawness  of  the  land  fa- 
vours the  sense  of  personal  relation  to  the 
supernatural.  There  is  not  much  interven- 
[107] 


BRET   HARTE 

tion  of  crops,  cities,  clothes,  and  manners 
between  you  and  the  organising  forces 
to  cut  off  communication.  All  this  begets 
in  Jimville  a  state  that  passes  explanation 
unless  you  will  accept  an  explanation  that 
passes  belief.  Along  with  killing  and 
drunkenness,  coveting  of  women,  charity, 
simplicity,  there  is  a  certain  indifference, 
blankness,  emptiness,  if  you  will,  of  all 
vapourings,  no  bubbling  of  the  pot — it 
wants  the  German  to  coin  a  word  for 
that — no  bread-envy,  no  brother-fervour. 
.  .  .  It  is  pure  Greek  in  that  it  repre- 
sents the  courage  to  shear  off  what  is  not 
worth  while.  Beyond  that  it  endures 
without  snivelling,  renounces  without 
self-pity,  fears  no  death,  rates  itself  not 
too  grea,t  in  the  scheme  of  things;  so  do 
[108] 


WORK 

beasts,  so  did  St.  Jerome  in  the  desert,  so 
also  in  the  elder  day  did  the  gods.  Life, 
its  performance,  cessation,  is  no  new  thing 
to  gape  and  wonder  at."  * 

It  is  of  life  taken  in  this  spirit  that 
Bret  Harte  first  offered  a  reasonable  in- 
terpretation. Since  then,  by  Kipling,  by 
Owen  Wister,  and  by  other  hands,  the 
feat  has  been  often  repeated.  Bret  Harte 
had  no  other  interpretation  to  offer.  He 
had  no  power  of  making  sophistication 
interesting.  Consequently  his  removal  to 
the  East  and  to  Europe  did  not,  as  hap- 
pened with  Mr.  Henry  James,  open  a 
new  career  for  him.  He  did  not  under- 
stand the  life  of  the  common  people  in 

*  Jimville :  A  Bret  Harte  Town.     Mary  Austin,  in  The 
Atlantic  Monthly,  November,  1902. 

[109] 


BRET   HARTE 

Germany  or  England;  and  he  utterly 
failed  in  attempting  to  portray  a  lady  or 
a  gentleman  of  any  race. 

Apart  from  his  purely  creative  work 
something  remains  to  be  said  of  him  as 

a    Satirist.       tllS    ,«i*irW1     jmpuV    fnnnH 

two  modes  of  expressioniin  humourous 
verse  and  in  prose  parody.  He  was 
capable  of  good  serious  verse.  As  early 
as  1865  he  had  published  a  volume  of 
somewhat  pretentious  romantic  poems, 
which  attracted  rather  less  attention  than 
it  deserved.  Even  earlier  than  this,  how- 
ever, he  had  hit  upon  his  real  vein  in 
"The  Society  upon  the  Stanislaus,"  in 
which  Truthful  James  and  his  artless 
method  of  moralising  appeared  for  the 
[110] 


WORE 

first  time.  But  it  remained  for  his  later 
narrative  about  the  Heathen  Chinee  to 
make  the  name  of  Truthful  James  fa- 
mous. The  explanation  of  the  greater 
vogue  of  the  latter  poem  lies  not  only  in 
the  prestige  which  now  belonged  to  the 
author  of  "The  Luck,"  but  in  the  more 
strikingly  satirical  quality  of  the  poem 
itself.  The  swarming  of  the  Chinese 
upon  the  Pacific  Slope  had  already  be- 
come a  "question."  "Chinese  cheap  la- 
bour" had  begun  to  be  a  war-cry;  and 
Bret  Harte,  with  his  instinct  for  the  con- 
crete, had  hit  upon  an  illustration  of  the 
problem  at  once  astonishingly  simple  and 
astonishingly  strong.  The  whole  prob- 
lem of  this  difficulty  between  East  and 
West  is  embodied  in  the  game  of  euchre 

[111] 


BRET   HARTE 

between  Truthful  James,  Bill  Nye,  and 
the  innocent  Ah  Sin: 

"Which  we  had  a  small  game, 

And  Ah  Sin  took  a  hand; 
It  was  euchre.     The  same 

He  did  not  understand; 
But  he  smiled  as  he  sat  by  the  table. 

With  a  smile  that  was  childlike  and  bland. 

"Yet  the  cards  they  were  stacked 

In  a  way  that  I  grieve, 
And  my  feelings  were  shocked 

At  the  state  of  Nye's  sleeve: 
Which  was  stuffed  full  of  aces  and  bowerst 

And  the  same  with  intent  to  deceive. 

"But  the  hands  that  were  played 

By  that  heathen  Chinee, 
And  the  points  that  were  made 
[112] 


WORK 

Were  quite  frightful  to  see, — 
Till  at  last  he  put  down  a  right  bower, 
Which  the  same  Nye  had  dealt  unto  me. 

"Then  I  looked  up  at  Nye, 

And  he  gazed  upon  me, 
And  he  rose  with  a  sigh, 

And  said,  'Can  this  be? 
We  are  ruined  by  Chinese  cheap  labour / 

And  he  went  for  that  heathen  Chinee. 

"In  the  scene  that  ensued 

I  did  not  take  a  hand; 
But  the  floor  it  was  strewed 

Like  the  leaves  on  the  strand 
With  the  cards  that  Ah  Sin  had  been  hiding 

In  the  game  he  did  not  understand. 

"In  his  sleeves,  which  were  long, 
He  had  twenty-four  packs,-?- 
Which  was  coming  it  strong, 
[113] 


BRET   HARTE 
Yet  I  state  but  the  facts; 

And  rve  found  on  his  nails,  which  were  taper, 
What's  frequent  in  tapers — that's  wax. 

"Which  is  why  I  remark. 

And  for  tricks  that  are  vain, 

And  my  language  is  plain, 
That  for  ways  that  are  dark, 
The  heathen  Chinee  is  peculiar, — 

Which  the  same  I  am  free  to  maintain." 

What  is  there  omitted  in  this  as  a  study 
of  international  relations?  The  duplicity 
of  Bill  Nye,  his  righteous  Occidental  in- 
dignation at  the  superior  duplicity  of  his 
adversary,  and  the  complacent  moralising 
of  Truthful  James  himself  constitute  this 
poem  a  consummate  piece  of  satire. 

The  verses  were  the  more  effective  from 
[114] 


WORK 

the  oddity  of  their  metrical  structure. 
They  were  built,  by  his  own  confession, 
in  whimsical  imitation  of  the  stately 
threnody  in  Swinburne's  "Atalanta  in 
Calydon."  Harte  is  said  to  have  illus- 
trated the  similarity  by  alternating  the 
lines  in  this  way: 

"Atalanta,  the  fairest  of  women,  whose  name  is  a 

blessing  to  speak — 
Yet  he  played  it  that  day  upon  William  and  me  in 

a  way  I  despise — 
The  narrowing  Symplegades  whitened  the  straits 

of  Propontis  with  spray — 
And  we  found  on  his  nails  which  were  taper ,  what's 

frequent  in  tapers — that's  wax" 

It  is  to  be  noted  that  the  elements  of 
satire  and  parody  are  both  present  in  this 
[115] 


BRET   HARTE 

most  famous  of  Bret  Harte's  metrical  ex- 
periments; and  it  was  in  the  employment 
of  these  elements  that  he  longest  main- 
tained his  strength.  He  never  achieved 
another  "Heathen  Chinee,"  but  his  first 
prose  volume  was  a  series  of  "Condensed 
Novels,"  and  so  was  his  last. 

Somebody  said,  during  the  period  of 
Bret^Harte's  undoing  at  the  hands—  of 
his  genius  was  "a 


lead  and  not  a  pocket."  This  was  pre- 
cisely untrue,  as  he  presently  proved  to 
the  world's  satisfaction.  His  pocket 
made  him  rich  in  a  day;  his  lead  barely 
yieldgd  pay-ore.^  When  he  _died  jonejpur- 
nal  said  thatjthe_wj3rldjhad  lost  one  of 
its  most  beloved  authors.  Another  said 
[116] 


WORK 


that  neither  the  world  nor JiteratureJiad 


Camp"  gave  himjrtanding 
smith  andjterne  and  Irving  and  Dickens 
and  all  the  glorious  company  oj^the  writ- 
ers  of  sentiment.  But  his  art  did  not 
grow;  it  consequently  did  not  hold  its 
own.  He  was  not  a  consummate  artist, 
he  was  not  a  commanding  personality. 
One  thing  he  did  admirably,  and  the 
world  is  in  no  danger  of  forgetting  him. 


THE  END 


[117] 


CONTEMPORARY  MEN  OF  LETTERS  SERIES 
WILLIAM  ASPENWALL  BRADLEY,  EDITOR 


THE  purpose  of  this  series  is  to  provide  brief  but  compre- 
hensive sketches,  biographical  and  critical,  of  living  writers 
and  of  those  who,  though  dead,  may  still  properly  be  re- 
garded as  belonging  to  our  time.  There  is  a  legitimate 
interest  in  the  lives  of  our  contemporaries  that  is  quite  dis- 
tinct from  mere  personal  curiosity.  There  is  also,  in  spite 
of  the  obvious  limitations  of  contemporary  criticism,  a 
justifiable  ambition  to  arrive  at  some  final  estimate  of  the 
literary  production  of  our  age  in  advance  of  posterity.  It 
is  to  satisfy  so  far  as  possible  this  ambition  and  this  interest 
that  the  present  series  is  planned.  European  as  well  as 
English  and  American  men  of  letters  are  included,  so  as  to 
give  a  complete  survey  of  the  intellectual  and  artistic  life  of 
an  age  that  is  characteristically  cosmopolitan.  It  is  also 
often  called  a  decadent  age,  and  it  has  therefore  a  varied 
outlook  on  life.  The  diverse'  and  often  conflicting  points  of 
view  that  we  thus  meet  with  in  modern  poets  and  prose 
writers  are  all  treated  intelligently  and  sympathetically  by 
writers  especially  qualified  in  every  instance,  although  the 
prevailing  temper  of  the  series  is  idealistic. 


McCLURE,  PHILLIPS  &  CO., 
141  East  Twenty-fifth  Street,  New  York. 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 

Los  Angeles 
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REC'D 


REC'D  LD-URC 

J  UN  2  9  1987 
REC'D  LD-irat 


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FEB     7  1983 


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